I've met people in the 1%. There's plenty of likable individuals and benevolent capitalists. OTOH, not without its bad apples though, like anything else. Wel

I've met people in the 1%. There's plenty of likable individuals and benevolent capitalists. OTOH, not without its bad apples though, like anything else. Well Bernie said Wednesday, the top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 93%. I don't know how accurate that is but I'll trust his figure for now. If any math comes up I'll leave it to volunteer statisticians to provide accurate error bands ;) What if the top 1% "only" controlled 10% of the wealth & power? That would still be an incredible bonanza for every one of them, 10:1 is living pretty large. But when you think about it, what difference would that make to the other 99% after all? There's just so many of them. It's probably pretty grim, let's see: Right now the other 99% have got almost a full 7% of the wealth and I guess people have been getting by figuring they've been doing as good as they can. People do call that a "rich" country :\ Now if the balance was "upset" or more fair like that, whichever way you want to look at it, those 99% would end up with a total of 90% of the wealth that the 1% didn't accumulate for themselves when they are at the 10% level. So with the cards stacked only 10:1 in favor of the current 1%, they would all still be fabulously wealthy. But not the poor 99% who didn't start out that great to begin with, they're just not near parity at this level. With only 90% of the wealth, that's not quite up there by a long shot, but at least it's maybe about (90/7 =) 12x as much as they have now. For 99% of the people. Would that even help anybody at all? If you were one of the 99% you would have 12x as much under such nominal conditions yourself. Would that even move the needle anyway? I admit that 12x as much disposable income would result from a more attainable offset than 12x as much total income, but that could be significant anyway. How would a mere 12x disposable income make you feel? There's no way you'd be anywhere close to the 1%, no matter how you look at it :\ So it's a question worth asking. Would anybody still say it was a rich country by comparison? Do they say that any more? Or maybe something else entirely? When you do the math?