Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is rather uncommon to believe that people in a society where everyone can publish their opinions must be artificially manipulated into conflict and dissent. I’d think that harmony and consent must instead be artificially manufactured. I’m curious about your life experience here. > that everyone forgets about the most significant problem in the USA - the top 5% of the country own over 80% of the wealth I’ve heard t…
That belief is actually really common in the US. Particularly among the upper middle class (the top 10%, and 90% of HN readers) to convince themselves that when they disagree with people in the working class, who outnumber them by far, that it's really not them vs the majority, but rather them vs a few evil billionaire puppet masters. And of course the only way to fight these evil billionaires (on behalf of the poor,…
From the 1930s to 1986, the top income tax bracket was 70-90%. Now it is 37% on income of $518,401 or more. This does not include wealth like stock, which is not taxed until sold. However, it can be used as collateral, and get the billionaires as much cash as they need, without having to declare that money as income.
What does any billionaire need that much money for? I guess they could get a really, really big closet and buy 10 million pairs of $100 shoes for every billion dollars.
The top 10% of the USA own 70% (SEVENTY PERCENT!!!) of all wealth in the USA. This was NOT the case in the 1940s and 1950s, where the MAGA fans want to bring us back to.
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Here is another way billionaires are f-ing the rest of the country:
Right now, REITS and corporation recently started hoovering up apartments and homes. As a result, rental prices have been skyrocketing. Do a search on it. Don't take my word. There was a small town or city in Tennessee, where people bought up a lion's share of the real estate market, and as the mayor said, you could rent a home for $1,000 five years ago, and now it costs over $2,000.
This is why people can't buy homes - the wealthy, through REITS and corporations are buying up homes by the hundreds of thousands. To make a nation of renters (except for the wealthy, of course, of course). The wealthy want us to go back to medieval England where the rich own all the land and we are all serfs.
There is not one county, in the entire USA, that is affordable to people in the lower class. Not one.
"In January, D.R. Horton Inc. purchased an entire subdivision in Conroe, Texas, built 124 houses, and then put the entire neighborhood on the block. The winning bid for $32 million dollars came from Fundrise LLC, an online real estate investing platform that lets you invest in commercial real estate through real estate investment trusts. A combination of investors swooping up single-family houses to rent out or flip, some of the lowest interest rates in history, and a housing shortage has caused home prices to surge, pricing normal people out of being able to purchase a home."
"Billionaire B. Wayne Hughes dispatched deputies to buy tens of thousands more across the U.S. Hughes’s company American Homes 4 Rent now owns about 53,000 suburban houses in 22 states and collects about $1 billion in annual rent from tenants. His plan paid off big. While millions of Americans were underwater – owing more on their mortgages than their homes were worth – investors accounted for about a third of sales in many markets."
"In 2012, the federal government launched a program that allowed corporations to easily purchase foreclosed homes by the thousands from Fannie Mae. The corporations then rented out the homes, creating more housing in areas heavily hit by foreclosures. Between 2011 and 2017, some of the world’s largest hedge funds spent billions of dollars on almost a quarter of a million homes. In parts of Atlanta, they bought almost 90 percent of the 7,500 homes sold between January 2011 and June 2012."
"Rather than protecting communities and making it easy for homeowners to restructure bad mortgages, the government facilitated the transfer of wealth from the American people to private-equity firms. By 2016, 95 percent of the distressed mortgages on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s books were auctioned off to Wall Street investors."
"Private-equity firms have developed new ways to secure credit, enabling them to leverage their equity and acquire a nearly endless amount of homes."
"During the current housing bubble, more than 200 corporations and investment firms are in the housing hunt. J.P. Morgan Asset Management and BlackRock Inc are among the biggest players, competing against everyday Americans in search of their first home. Most are being priced out easily by billion-dollar companies. Builders like LGI Homes Inc are wholesaling thousands of homes to bulk buyer investors. Investment manager PCCP LLC – which typically goes after commercial property – recently bought several rental-home communities throughout the Southeast."
Madison Realty recently closed on a $110 million project in Los Angeles, and nearly one third of the 700 home sites are being sold to investors.
“A lot of things that would have been for-sale housing are going to be for-rent housing,” Josh Zegen, Madison’s managing principal told the Wall Street Journal.