For four months we’ve heard Bernie Sanders, one of the first in a growing chorus, decry the large and growing income inequality in our country. You’re probably familiar with most of the headline facts; the widest income gap since the 1920’s, the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 90%, 58% of all new income since the 2008 crash has gone to the top 1%, blah, blah, blah.
Here’s the thing, though… what does this mean to YOU? It’s pretty abstract that the “bottom” 99% is being squeezed, so how much does financial malfeasance, predatory banking, vulture capitalism and all the rest add up to for YOU, in real dollars? Two economists crunched the numbers to find out. Get this: “We estimate that the financial system will impose an excess cost of as much as $22.7 trillion between 1990 and 2023, making finance in 
its current form a NET DRAG on the American economy.” (emphasis unsurprisingly ours). That’s about $40K to $70K for every man, woman, and child in the US over a 15-year period. The report itself goes into much more precise, much uglier detail which is just great for us! After all, this column IS called News To Make You Furious…
Economists Gerald Epstein and Juan Antonio Montecino at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, were the number crunchers in this story. They gathered data for families, taxpayers, and businesses and how each are affected by now-common, once-illegal practices of the financial world. From IRA’s to bank accounts, payday lenders to portfolio managers, they looked at each of the petty little ways we’re nickeled and dimed into wage slavery.
To raise your rage this month we bring you the full 51-page Epstein and Montecino report. We also have a couple abstracts and analyses (including one from Epstein and Montecino themselves) that should magnify your madness quite nicely, as well as links to more broad-based descriptions of the problem. If your veins are popping a little too much when all that’s done we even included a couple links to reassure you that there is somebody out there trying to do something about it. Now dig in for your monthly allotment of animosity, and enjoy!
One page summary of “OverCharged, the High Cost of High Finance” by Epstein and Montecino, Jul 2016
Overcharged: The High Cost of High Finance, full report by by Epstein and Montecino, Jul 2016
Income and Wealth Inequality, from the Bernie Sanders website
How Much Do Shady Financial Practices Cost You, Exactly? By Lynn Parramore at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Jul 2016
Inequality.org, a website of the Institute for Policy Studies, slices the inequality pie in every way you can imagine, and several you probably can’t.
And here’s the one link to give you some hope…
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the organization started by Elizabeth Warren, which exists to “make sure banks, lenders, and other financial companies treat you fairly”.
