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As we have seen, The Donald's economic policy actions and nostrums were thoroughly wrong-headed and counterpro- ductive. But the opposite assumption—that market capitalism was working according to the texts penned by Adam Smith— was also dead wrong and had been for decades. Today's bailout- ridden crony capitalism is not remotely the real thing, and that's especially because free markets can't function efficiently and pro- ductively when they are flooded with cheap credit printed by the central bank.
The ill effects of these perversions are legion, but one of the most obnoxious is the massive financial windfall to a tiny elite of the wealthy and a concomitant depletion of the middle class. Ironically, The Donald was elected and heralded by the latter, but his policies did absolutely nothing to change the system's long-standing windfalls to the rich.
Here is but one of the smoking guns that can be offered in evi- dence. To wit, in 1989 the collective net worth of the top 1 percent of households weighed in at $4.8 trillion, which was 6.2x the $775 billion net worth of the bottom 50 percent of households. By Q1 2022, however, those figures were $45 trillion versus $3.7 trillion, meaning that the wealth differential was now 12.2x.
In round numbers, therefore, the top 1 percent gained $40 tril- lion of wealth over that thirty-three-year period compared to the mere $3 trillion gain of the bottom 50 percent. Stated differently, there are currently 65 million households in the bottom 50 per- cent, which have an average net worth of just $56,000. This com- pares to the 1.2 million households in the top 1 percent which currently sport an average net worth of $38,000,000.
Needless to say, there is no reason to believe that left to its own devices free market capitalism would generate this 680:1 wealth differential per household. Indeed, three decades ago—and well before the Fed went into money-printing overdrive—the per household wealth differential between the top 1 percent and the bottom 50 percent was barely half of today's level.