The apartment atop Manhattan's newest "needle" tower, the 90-story One57, just went for $90 million.
The richest Americans hold more of the nation's wealth than they have in almost a century. What do they spend it on? As you might expect, personal jets, giant yachts, works of art, and luxury penthouses.
And also on politics. In fact, their political spending has been growing faster than their spending on anything else. It's been growing even faster than their wealth.
According to new
research by Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics, the richest one-hundredth of one percent of Americans now hold over 11 percent of the nation's total wealth. That's a higher share than the top .01 percent held in 1929, before the Great Crash.
We're talking about 16,000 people, each worth at least $110 million.
One way to get your mind around this is to compare their wealth to that of the average family. In 1978, the typical wealth holder in the top .01 percent was 220 times richer than the average American.
By 2012, he or she was 1,120 times richer.It's hard to spend this kind of money.
The uber rich are lining up for the new Aerion AS2 private jet, priced at $100 million, that seats eleven and includes a deluxe dining room and shower facilities, and will be able to cross the Atlantic in just four hours.
And for duplexes high in the air. The one atop Manhattan's newest "needle" tower, the 90-story One57, just went for $90 million.
Why should we care?
Comment: It's no surpirse that the 1 percenters find it easy to tune out everything that doesn't serve their own interests in one way or another. Worse yet, it's an influence that multiplies over generations. Greed is a pathology that seems incurable, burning itself out only when everything that it can consume is gone. That day is not far off.