If the ultrarich hadn't rigged the system in their favor, your annual pay would be doubled — somewhere between $48,000 and $63,000 higher per year.
That's about $1,000 or more per weekly paycheck that you could have spent in your community, invested in home improvements, or saved for a rainy day, but which instead went to the wealthiest Americans.
So if it feels like you're working harder for less money than your parents' and grandparents' generations, that's because you are.
Think about what you could do with an extra thousand dollars a week. We've all heard the statistic that nearly half of all Americans are only one $400 emergency away from catastrophe. This is why Americans don't have that $400 — that money, and much more, has gone to some rich guy's offshore bank account.
"To be clear, this is not some fantasy," and those numbers aren't hypothetical, David Goldstein said in the latest episode of "Pitchfork Economics."
"That is what you would have been earning had income distributions remained constant, and had incomes broadly continued to grow at the same rate as the GDP, as they had done in the three decades prior to 1975," he said.
