youtube capture by Pat Darnell | Nov 13, 2013 | Bryan TX
0:00there's a chart SR recently that I can't get out of my head
0:03Harvard Business professor and economist ass more than 5,000 Americans
0:08how they thought well was distributed in the United States
0:12this is what they said they thought it was dividing the country into five rough
0:15group at the top bottom
0:17and middle 3 20 percent group they asked people
0:21how they thought the wealth in this country was divided NES them
0:25what they thought was the ideal distribution and ninety-two percent
0:29that at least nine outta 10 a.m. said it should be more like this
0:33in other words more equitable than they think it is
0:37now that fact is telling admittedly the notion that most Americans know that the
0:41system is
0:42already skewed unfairly to what's most interesting to me
0:46is the reality compared to our perception the ideal
0:50is as far removed from our perception is reality
0:54as the actual distribution is from what we think
0:57exists in this country so ignore the ideal for a moment
1:01here's what we think it is again and here
1:04is the actual distributional shockingly skewed
1:08not only to the bottom 20 percent and the next 20 percent
1:12the bottom forty percent of Americans barely have
1:16any the wealth I mean it's hard even see them on the chart
1:20but the top one percent has more of the country's wealth
1:24then nine out of 10 Americans believe the entire top 20 percent should have
1:29mind-blowing but let's look at it another way because
1:33I find this chart kinda difficult to wrap my head around instead let's reduce
1:37the 311 million Americans to
1:40just a representative 100 people make it simple
1:44here they are teachers coaches firefighters construction workers
1:49engineers doctors lawyers some investment bankers the CEO
1:53may be a celebrity culture now let's line him up according to their wealth
1:57poorest people on the left wealthiest on the right just a steady row folks based
2:02on their net worth
2:03color coding like we did before based on which 20 percent quintile they volunteer
2:09now let's reduce the total wealth the United States
2:12which was roughly fifty four trillion dollars in 2009
2:16to this symbolic pi love cash and let's distributed
2:21among our 100 Americans well appear socialism
2:25all the wealth of the country distributed equally we all know that
2:28will work
2:29we need to encourage people to work can work hard to achieve that goal American
2:33Dream and keep our country moving forward
2:36so hears that night deal
2:39we asked everyone about something like this occur
2:42this isn't to bed we've got some incentive as the wealthiest folks are
2:46now about
2:4710 to 20 times better off in the poorest Americans
2:51but hey even the poor folks aren't actually poor
2:54since the poverty line is stated almost entirely off the chart
2:58we have a super healthy middle-class with a smooth transition into wealth
3:03and yes Republicans and Democrats alike chose this curve nine out of 10 people
3:09ninety-two percent said this was a nice ideal distribution of America's wealth
3:14the let's move on this is what people think
3:18America's wealth distribution actually looks like not as equitable clearly
3:23but for me even this still looks pretty great
3:26yes the poorest 20 to 30 percent are starting to suffer quite a lot compared
3:31to the ideal
3:33in the middle class is certainly struggling more than they were
3:36while the rich in wealthier making roughly a hundred times that of the
3:40poorest Americans
3:41in about ten times that if the still healthy middle-class
3:44sadly this isn't even close to the reality
3:48here is the actual distribution of wealth in America
3:52the poorest Americans don't even register
3:56they're down to pocket change and the middle class
4:00is barely distinguishable from the poor in fact
4:03even the rich between the top 10 in 20 percentile
4:07are worse off only the top 10 percent or better off
4:10and how much better off so much better off the top
4:14to 25 percent were actually of the chart
4:17at this scale and the top one percent
4:20this can were his stack of money stretch is ten times higher than we can show
4:27here's his stack of cash re stacked all by itself
4:31this is the top one percent we've been hearing so much about
4:34so much green in his pockets that I have to give him a whole new column his own
4:39because he won't fit on my chart 1 percent of America has
4:43forty percent of all the nation's wealth
4:46the bottom eighty percent 8 out of every 10 people
4:50work a Dr these 100 only has
4:53seven-percent between them in this
4:56only gotten worse in the last twenty to thirty years
4:59while the richest 1 percent take home almost a quarter
5:03the national income today in 1976
5:06they took home only nine percent meaning their share of income has nearly tripled
5:10in the last thirty years
5:13the top one percent own half the country stocks bonds and mutual funds
5:18the bottom 50 percent of Americans only
5:21half a percent these investments which means
5:25P aren't investing they're just scraping by I'm sure many of these wealthy people
5:29have worked very hard for their money
5:31but do you really believe that the CEO was working
5:34380 times harder his average
5:38employees not as lowest-paid employees not the janitor
5:42but the average earner in his company the average worker needs to work more
5:46than a month
5:47turn with the CEO makes in one our
5:51we certainly don't have to go all the way to socialism to find something that
5:55is fair
5:56for hard-working Americans we don't even have to achieve what most of us consider
6:00might be
6:01ideal all we need to do is wake up
6:04in reliance that the reality in this country
6:08is not it all what we think it is
6:11gone
