Finance

What Recovery? During Record Economic Expansion, Bottom 90 Percent’s Share Continues To Plummet

The purported economic recovery of the past 10 years has affected different segments of the population very unevenly.

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In many ways, the last 10 years of the U.S. economy has been a story of success. Starting in June of 2009, the GDP started growing, and it hasn’t yet stopped. As of the beginning of July, 2019, the United States has enjoyed 121 months of economic expansion, a new record. The previous record for the most consecutive months of economic expansion, 120, was set from March of 1991 to March of 2001, according to figures from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

This record-setting period of growth has expressed itself in many positive ways. The S&P 500 index recently hit a new high. As of May, the national unemployment rate was just 3.6 percent, the lowest it has been since 1969. We’re now collectively spending more than $36 billion a year on video games, the most ever. Progress, right?

However, despite the overall economic successes of the past few years, anyone with eyes, who even occasionally spends time outside the confines of a private golf club, can see that the purported economic recovery of the past 10 years has affected different segments of the population very unevenly.

It’s not just those at the absolute bottom of the economic ladder who aren’t getting a fair shake. Almost all of us continue to get a smaller and smaller piece of the pie, even as new growth records are shattered. According to a Reuters analysis of data from the Federal Reserve Washington Center for Equitable Growth, the top one percent own about 38.6 percent of the total U.S. wealth. The next nine percent own about 38.5 percent of the wealth. The other 90 percent of us get to divvy up just 22.9 percent of the total wealth our supposedly roaring economy is generating.

In fact, the share of the wealth enjoyed by the bottom 90 percent of Americans fell over the course of the entire economic recovery following the Great Recession. In 2007, the top one percent, the next nine percent, and the bottom 90 percent owned 33.6 percent, 37.8 percent, and 28.6 percent of the wealth, respectively. By 2013, the wealth gap had widened further, with 35.6 percent of the nation’s wealth in the hands of the top one percent, 39.5 percent held by the next nine percent, and just a quarter of the wealth left over for everyone else. The trend continues to this day, and nothing, at least not in the immediate future, looks likely to reverse it.

Even though the bottom 90 percent’s share of the wealth keeps going down, certainly some individual circumstances have improved marginally over time. Wages have grown moderately over the course of the economic expansion, ticking up by about two percent per year over most of the past ten years. More recently, wage gains have reached closer to three percent annually (wage gains hit 3.1 percent over the past year, for instance). When the pie is getting bigger, sometimes even a smaller piece of it is an increase from what you had before. Still, historically, economic boom times have routinely posted annual wage gains for workers at a much healthier four percent.

Wage gains have not been the only tepid part of the economic expansion. While the expansion is record-setting in terms of its length, it is far from remarkable in terms of its strength. Since the current expansion began in 2009, the American GDP has grown by about 25 percent. For comparison, by the end of the shorter expansion that started in 1991, the GDP had gained 42.6 percent. A number of other 20th century economic expansions, while shorter than the current one, led to greater overall increases in GDP.

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What we have is an unusually lengthy, but unusually weak, economic expansion in which the vast majority of the proceeds have gone to the top ten percent. The super-rich are doing even better than just the run-of-the-mill rich, with the wealthiest 400 Americans — the top 0.00025 percent — owning as much as the bottom 60 percent, some 150 million U.S. adults. So, when you hear the talking heads touting this great, historic economy, keep in mind who it’s been great for, and what actually makes it historic.

Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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