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How many careers equal one fortune?
The same companies that generate this wealth don't pay workers enough to survive.
When corporations pay poverty wages, the wealth their workers create flows to the top while taxpayers fund SNAP, Medicaid, and housing assistance to keep those same workers alive. It's a subsidy from the public to the shareholders.
See the full subsidy breakdownMoney doesn't just sit. It circulates. When low-income workers get a dollar, they spend it. That spending becomes someone else's income, which they spend, and so on.
When wealth concentrates at the top, this circulation slows. Billionaires can only spend so much. The rest sits in assets, removed from the productive economy.
Every dollar held by the ultra-wealthy instead of circulating through wages represents lost economic activity: fewer purchases, fewer jobs, slower growth.
A paycheck is spent almost immediately on rent, food, transport, and healthcare, and becomes someone else's income.
There is only so much one household can consume. Past that point, wealth sits in stocks, real estate, and other assets rather than circulating as spending.
“It's not that the wealthy have too much. It's that their wealth represents economic oxygen (purchasing power, demand, circulation) that's been removed from everyone else.”
When one person accumulates thousands of working lifetimes worth of wealth, that's thousands of lifetimes of economic participation that's been concentrated into assets rather than flowing through wages, purchases, and communities.
And when those workers can't survive on their wages? Taxpayers step in. The owners keep the profits. The public pays to maintain the workforce. That's the hidden subsidy.