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SHOULDN’T EVERY AMERICAN ENJOY THE LUXURY OF A ROOF?  
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Sam Pizzigati
March 28, 2024
Inequality.org
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_ A frightening share of our richest don’t necessarily think so _

, Khallid Shabazz

 

America, a new report details, is minting millionaires at a record
pace. Some 37 percent of the world’s millionaires, analysts at the
wealth advisory firm Henley & Partners calculate
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now call the United States home.

And these analysts are talking _real_ millionaires, not those
Americans who rate as “millionaires” only because they’re living
in homes that have wildly appreciated in value since their purchase
decades ago. Those appreciations have left typical fifty-something
American homeowners, the latest Federal Reserve stats show
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with personal net worths a bit over $1 million.

The researchers from Henley and their partners at New World Wealth
don’t count these house-rich homeowners as millionaires. They only
rate as millionaires those households with over $1 million
in _investible_ assets — and the United States, their
research finds
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hosts far, far more of these honest-to-goodness millionaires than any
other nation on Earth.

The numbers: Over 5.5 million Americans now hold liquid assets worth
over $1 million. That total has soared 62 percent over the past
decade, “well above,” observes
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analyst Robert Frank, the overall global real-millionaire increase of
a mere 38 percent.

Rich people-friendly observers of America’s economic scene,
naturally enough, see stats like these as cause for nothing but
celebration. The wealthier our wealthiest become, they postulate, the
more jobs — and wealth — these rich create for everyone else. A
rising tide, as they like to quip, lifts all boats.

But we are, in fact, seeing no significant rising of any sort for
America’s working families. We are witnessing instead stunning
increases in what America’s rich are spending on themselves. One
revealing recent stat: Our U.S. well-to-do, researchers at Art Basel
and the banking giant UBS report
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now account for 42 percent of global fine art sales, well above
China’s 19-percent second-place share.

Another reflection of America’s luxury-spending dominance: The
world’s top premium luxury brands — think glamorous retailers like
Cartier, Bergdorf Goodman, and Gucci — all have flagship stores in
Manhattan. Just this past December, the luxury powerhouse
Prada announced
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to spend $835 million buying up the building that hosts its current
Fifth Avenue flagship and the building next door.

For America’s poorest, meanwhile, “luxury” has come to mean
keeping a roof over your head.

The number of Americans chronically homeless, the U.S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development reported out this past December, has
been climbing since 2016 — in what Jeff Olivet, the director of the
U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, likens
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a “game of really vicious musical chairs.” The United States, he
explains, has “an incredible deficit of affordable housing units,”
with only one unit available for every three extremely low-income
renters.

And “if someone has a medical condition, a mental health disability,
a substance use disorder,” Olivet adds, “it makes it all that much
more complex for someone to exit homelessness.”

The solution to this growing housing squeeze? America’s most
conservative lawmakers have one. Let’s simply do our best, these
lawmakers are proposing, to keep our nation’s homeless out of sight.

In Florida, that approach has actually become law. Governor Ron
DeSantis, fresh off his go-nowhere campaign for the GOP presidential
nomination, has just signed into law legislation
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makes it illegal
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local municipalities to let homeless people camp or sleep on public
property after this October 1.

“Florida,” DeSantis declared
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the bill’s signing, “will not allow homeless encampments to
intrude on its citizens or undermine their quality of life like we see
in states like New York and California.”

The new Florida law requires local governments without enough bed
capacity for unhoused families to set up homeless camps far from parks
and other public facilities — and the act also penalizes localities
that wink at rough sleeping outside these new hidden-away camps.

Diana Stanley, a top exec in Palm Beach charity circles, considers
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new approach “a statement that we’ve stopped caring about our
brothers and sisters.” The main message Stanley takes from the
state’s new homelessness legislation: “If we can’t see them,
then we don’t have to help them.”

Florida’s latest homeless legislation, Stanley stresses, “does
absolutely nothing to address the root cause of homelessness, the lack
of affordable housing.” The state’s focus, agrees University of
Central Florida sociologist Amy Donley, ought to be on “helping
people into housing, not encampments.”

Measures that would help do just that, meanwhile, have come under
intense fire from right-wing lawmakers in other states. Those
lawmakers are particularly aiming that fire at state and local
experiments in providing low-income families with guaranteed,
no-strings basic incomes.

In Iowa, one GOP state legislator is calling
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basic-income efforts “socialism on steroids.” The sponsor of
another move to ban basic incomes, South Dakota’s John Wiik,
is charging
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basic-income plans amount to “a one-way ticket to government
dependency.” In February, lawmakers in Arizona, home to the
nation’s fourth-highest homeless rate, passed a bill that bans
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program where persons are provided with regular, periodic cash
payments” they can use “for any purpose.”

As of the end of February, lawmakers in some four other states had
introduced bills with similar bans.

Who’s driving this nationally coordinated move to end experiments in
basic income? Some of America’s most secretive wealthy, charges
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recent analysis by Scott Sartens, a founding committee member of Basic
Income Action.

These wealthy, Sartens notes, have been bankrolling an outfit that
calls itself the Foundation for Government Accountability, “a
lobbying group with a billionaire-fueled junk science record every
American should know about.”

Among the Foundation’s prime funders: the hard-right billionaires
Richard and Liz Uihlein, the nation’s fourth-largest contributors to
political campaigns. The Uihleins have pumped almost $18 million into
the machinations of the Foundation for Government Accountability.
Almost that much has come from the Donors Trust network, a powerhouse
that has become what _Mother Jones_ calls
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dark-money ATM of the right.”

Other major Foundation for Government Accountability funders include
assorted deep-pocket entities with a history, notes
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Investigations Center director Kert Davies, of “hating regulation
and trying to stop any progress on things like climate change because
they see it as almost a step toward communism.”

The billionaires underwriting all these entities, Basic Income
Action’s Scott Sartens believes
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share a common fundamental outlook. They fear “a world where things
are a bit less unequal,” a world without so many average people
“having no power to say anything but yes.”

May those rich see emerge that new world they so fear. Soon.

_SAM PIZZIGATI, AN INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES ASSOCIATE FELLOW,
CO-EDITS INEQUALITY.ORG. HIS LATEST BOOKS INCLUDE The Case for a
Maximum Wage
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Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that
Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970
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* homelessness
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* Housing Crisis
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* millionaires
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* selfish profit
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