The numbers are staggering: Between 2007 and 2016, the average wealth of the top 1 percent increased by $4.9 million, while the wealth of the median family declined by $42,000. The top 1 percent of families own more wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined.
Wealth inequality is not only a growing problem, but one that has shown little sign of reversing course.
Today in the Intercept I covered a new idea to address this: establishing a national social wealth fund in the United States. In a nut-shell, the government would accumulate assets—like stocks, bonds and real estate—and as the value of those publicly-managed assets go up, so would the fund’s investment shares. Each year, citizens would receive a “universal basic dividend” from the income earned from the fund’s investments, while more and more of the nation’s wealth would move under government control.
It’s a provocative proposal, and one that Hillary Clinton actually voiced enthusiasm for in her recent memoir. Alaska has a state-run social wealth fund, and for the last thirty years has sent its citizens annual dividend checks. It’s not a coincidence that Alaska is also the most economically equal state in the country.
But could it work in the U.S? The dividends would certainly start out tiny, but social security benefits also started out extremely small in 1935, and grew over time. I talked to the report’s author Matt Bruenig, an economist in the U.K pushing a similar idea, a state senator in Alaska, and Mike Konczal, a critic of the idea. You can read some of Mike’s concerns in my piece, and he also expanded on his thoughts in a blog post published after my story came out. (Matt then responded to Mike.) It’s shaping up to be a very interesting debate.
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In some other election news: Andrew Gillum won the Democratic primary for governor tonight in Florida. He ran as an unabashed progressive, and no polls had him winning the race. Turnout was way up: over 1.4 million registered Democrats voted in tonight’s FL primary, compared to about 838,000 in 2014.
Gillum is gunning to be Florida’s first black governor, and he’ll be facing off against the Trump-endorsed GOP candidate, Ron DeSantis. In Georgia, Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams is also running for governor against a Trump-endorsed candidate, Brian Kemp. She’s aiming to be the nation’s first black female governor. In Maryland, Ben Jealous is running to unseat the sitting Republican governor Larry Hogan, hoping to become the state’s first black governor.
Not one sitting governor in any of the 50 states is black. In all of U.S history only two African-American men have ever been elected governor.