> But if you took the money from the 1% and distributed it to everyone, it would probably amount to a few thousand dollars each, at best.
That's patently absurd, given that the top 1% own 90%+ of the wealth.
That's patently absurd, given that the top 1% own 90%+ of the wealth.
Citation, please? https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fi... page 24 claims that globally the top 8.1% own 84.6% of the wealth, while the top 0.7% own 45.2%. So the top 1% owns something between those two numbers.
Within the US, the top 1% owns an even smaller fraction (of a bigger per-capita pie), because there are many fewer poor people.
That said, the top 1% do own quite a bit of wealth. Same report, page 15, figure 2, looks to me like total global wealth is about $260 trillion as of 2015. World population is 7.3 billion. That comes out to $35000 per person or so. So globally this number would in fact come out higher than a few thousand dollars; per our calculations above it's about 0.5 to 0.85 times $35k (but note that this is including the the "1%" quite a large number of US retirees, for example; the threshold for 1% global wealth is not that high).
If you look at the US, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United_States#We... has numbers for 2007 saying that the top 1% owned 34.6% of the total wealth but that grew to 37.1% after the Great Recession. Total wealth in the US according to the above Credit Suisse report is about $86 trillion; that gives about $100,000 per person if you redistribute the wealth of the top 1%.