Many other studies have documented this trend, chronicled its impact, and analyzed its causes. Of course, America’s chronic case of extreme inequality is old news. Why is our death toll so high and our unemployment rate so staggeringly off the charts? Why was our nation so unprepared, and our economy so fragile? Why have we lacked the stamina and the will to contain the virus like most other advanced nations? The reason is staring us in the face: a stampede of rising inequality that has been trampling the lives and livelihoods of the vast majority of Americans, year after year after year. But look straight into the eyes of the elephant in the room, and it is impossible to deny the many ways in which our extreme inequality-an exceptionally American affliction-has made the virus more deadly and its economic consequences more dire than in any other advanced nation.

It is easy to see how such a deadly virus, and the draconian measures required to contain it, might spark an economic depression. Imagine how many more lives would have been saved had our people been more resilient. Imagine how much richer and more resilient the American people would be. It is no surprise then, according to the CDC, that COVID-19 inflicts “a disproportionate burden of illness and death among racial and ethnic minority groups.” But imagine how much safer, healthier, and empowered all American workers might be if that $50 trillion had been paid out in wages instead of being funneled into corporate profits and the offshore accounts of the super-rich. Low-wage workers and their families, disproportionately people of color, suffer from far higher rates of asthma, hypertension, diabetes, and other COVID-19 comorbidities yet they are also far less likely to have health insurance, and far more likely to work in “essential” industries with the highest rates of coronavirus exposure and transmission. The march called on Governor Andrew Cuomo to pass a tax on billionaires and to fund workers excluded from unemployment and federal aid programs Spencer Platt-Getty ImagesĮven inequality is meted out unequally. People participate in a 'March on Billionaires' event on July 17 in New York City. That’s $50 trillion that would have gone into the paychecks of working Americans had inequality held constant-$50 trillion that would have built a far larger and more prosperous economy-$50 trillion that would have enabled the vast majority of Americans to enter this pandemic far more healthy, resilient, and financially secure. At a recent pace of about $2.5 trillion a year, that number we estimate crossed the $50 trillion mark by early 2020.

Price and Edwards calculate that the cumulative tab for our four-decade-long experiment in radical inequality had grown to over $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. 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.

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