The top 1% in America owns more wealth than the entire middle class combined.
That's not Cuba. That's not 1850. That's the country you live in right now.
The credit system is one of the main tools that keeps it that way.
Here's the wealth distribution nobody shows on TV. According to the Federal Reserve's own data:
The top 1% owns about 30% of all wealth in America.
The top 10% owns about 67%.
The bottom 50% owns 2.5%.
Half the countryβ165 million peopleβowns 2.5% of everything. The other half owns 97.5%. This is the Fed's published quarterly report.
How did this happen? Did the bottom half just not work hard or make bad choices?
No. The system is structurally designed to compound wealth at the top and extract it from the bottom. The credit system is the engine.
If you have wealth, you get 0-3% interest rates on borrowed money to buy assets.
If you don't, you get 24-300% interest rates on borrowed money to survive.
Same word, "credit," but completely different prices depending on which side of the line you started on.
A wealthy family takes a $2M loan at 3% to buy a building that appreciates 7%. Net gain: 4% on $2M, or $80,000 a year in passive wealth growth, plus the tax deduction.
A working family takes a $400 payday loan at 391% APR to fix their car. They pay back $700 over two months. Net loss: $300 transferred to the lender.
Multiply that gap across 165 million Americans over 50 years and you get today's wealth distribution. The poor are not poor because they're irresponsible. The poor are poor because the financial system charges them more for everything and pays them less for everything.