That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP-enough to more than double median income-enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. According to a groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation.
That is how much the upward redistribution of income has cost American workers over the past several decades. How big is this elephant? A staggering $50 trillion.