A new report details that America is creating billionaires at a record pace. About 37% of the world's richest people now call the United States home, according to estimates by analysts at wealth advisory firm Henley & Partners.
And analysts say: genuine Americans don't count themselves as “millionaires” just because they live in a house that has increased significantly in value since they bought it decades ago. These price increases have left the typical American homeowner in his 50s with a personal net worth of just over $1 million, according to the latest Federal Reserve figures.
Henry researchers and New World Wealth partners do not count these wealthy homeowners as millionaires. They only rate households with assets of $1 million or more as millionaires. investable Their research found that the United States is home to far more of these honest-to-goodness billionaires than any other country on earth.
Lawmakers in Arizona, which has the fourth-highest homelessness rate in the nation, passed a bill in February that would ban “periodic, periodic cash disbursement programs” that could be used “for any purpose.”
The numbers: More than 5.5 million Americans currently have liquid assets of $1 million or more.This total has surged 62% over the past 10 years and is “much more than that,” it observes.CNBC Analyst Robert Frank says the number of real billionaires worldwide has increased by just 38%.
Pro-rich observers of the American business world understandably find such statistics nothing short of celebratory. They assume that as the richest people get richer, they create more jobs and wealth for other people. As they say, a rising tide lifts all ships.
But in reality, there has been no significant increase of any kind in working households in the United States. Rather, we are witnessing an alarming increase in the amount of money wealthy Americans spend on themselves. According to recent statistics, a report by Art Basel researchers and banking giant UBS shows that the United States currently accounts for 42% of global art sales, with China in second place. This is significantly higher than 19%.
Another reflection of America's dominance in luxury spending. Think of glamorous retailers such as Cartier, Bergdorf, He Goodman, and Gucci. All of the world's top luxury brands have flagship stores in Manhattan. Just last December, luxury brand Prada announced plans to buy the building that currently houses its Fifth Avenue flagship and the building next door for $835 million.
Meanwhile, for America's poorest people, “luxury” has come to mean keeping a roof over their heads.
The number of chronically homeless Americans, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported in December, has increased since 2016, said Jeff Olivet, director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. He compares it to a “really malicious game.'' A game of musical chairs. He said the United States has an “incredible shortage of affordable housing,” with only one unit available for every three very low-income renters.
And “exiting homelessness becomes even more complicated when someone has a medical condition, mental health disorder, or substance use disorder,” Olivet added.
Is there a solution to this growing housing squeeze? America's most conservative legislators have it. Let's just do our best to keep our nation's homeless out of sight, lawmakers suggest.
In Florida, that approach actually became law. Gov. Ron DeSantis, fresh off a campaign that went nowhere for the Republican presidential candidate, has made it illegal for local governments to allow homeless people to camp or sleep on public land starting Oct. 1 of this year. We just signed a bill that says.
“Florida will not allow homeless encampments to infiltrate our people and undermine our quality of life, as we have seen in states like New York and California,” DeSantis said upon signing the bill. declared.
A new Florida law requires local governments without sufficient bed capacity for unhoused families to set up homeless camps far from parks and other public facilities, and the law also , it also provides for penalizing communities who sleep poorly outside these new hidden camps.
Diana Stanley, a top executive at Palm Beach Philanthropies, believes Florida's new approach is “a declaration that we have stopped caring about our brothers and sisters.” Stanley's main message from the state's new homeless law is: “If you can't see them, you don't need to help them.”
Stanley emphasized that Florida's latest homelessness law “does nothing to address the root cause of homelessness: the lack of affordable housing.” Amy Donley, a sociologist at the University of Central Florida, agrees that the state's focus should be on “helping people get into housing rather than into camps.”
Meanwhile, measures that would help make that happen have come under fire from right-wing lawmakers in other states. These lawmakers specifically aim to ignite state and local experiments in providing guaranteed, no-strings-attached basic income to low-income households.
In Iowa, one Republican state lawmaker calls these basic income efforts “socialism on steroids.” John Wick of South Dakota, a proponent of another movement to ban basic income, denounces basic income plans as tantamount to a “one-way ticket to government dependency.” Lawmakers in Arizona, which has the fourth-highest homelessness rate in the nation, passed a bill in February that would ban “periodic, periodic cash disbursement programs” that could be used “for any purpose.”
As of late February, lawmakers in four other states had introduced bills with similar bans.
Who is driving this nationally coordinated movement to end the basic income experiment? Some of America's most secretive wealthy people are the founders of the Income to Support All Foundation indicted a recent analysis by Chairman Scott Santens.
Santens points out that these wealthy people fund an organization calling itself the Government Accountability Foundation. The group is a “billionaire-fueled lobbying group with a record of junk science that every American should know.”
Among the foundation's major donors are far-right billionaires Richard and Liz Uihlein, who are the fourth-largest donors to political campaigns in the United States. The Uihleins poured about $18 million into the Government Accountability Foundation conspiracy. Almost that amount comes from the Donors Trust Network, which is a huge help. mother jonesIt is called the “Yamikin ATM on the right”.
Other major funders of the Government Accountability Foundation include: “They hate regulation and seek to stop all progress because they hate regulation and see advances like climate change as almost a step toward communism.” It includes a variety of well-heeled organizations with a history of ”
Scott Santens of the Income to Support All Foundation believes the billionaires taking on all of these entities share a common fundamental outlook. They fear a world in which things are a little less unequal, a world in which there are not too many average people who can only say yes.
May a new world emerge that the wealthy fear. soon.
