Billionaires Got $6.5 Trillion From The Pandemic (Script & Sources)

Good morning, great news! Since the start of the pandemic, average wages have skyrocketed, jumping by 15% month-over-month. This is historically unprecedented, and the fastest average wage growth we’ve ever seen in US history, so pop the champagne, it’s time to celebrate, right?! Just kidding, it’s absolutely terrible news, and actually reflects the worst wage crisis we’ve ever seen.

In 2020 and 2021, average income skyrocketed for one reason alone: the bottom fell out of the low-wage labor market - low-wage workers went from making next to nothing,

to actually making nothing. Out of nearly 10 million jobs lost over the course of the pandemic, 80% of them were held by low-wage workers. The average wage statistic is actually a reflection of things getting SO bad for the bottom 25% that they’re just not counted anymore when measuring wages.

In fact, a report by the Economic Policy Institute found that before the pandemic, only 10 out of the last 40 years saw any consistent increase in wages. The American Wage Crisis has been in the making for decades, and the pandemic brought it to a critical breaking point. Between 1979 and 2020, the only income level that saw any dramatic growth was the highest-wage category, which grew twice as fast as the median, and 5 times as fast as the bottom category.

Throughout the pandemic, workers lost a collective $3.5 trillion dollars in wages, almost all coming from the working class - while in the same time period, the ultra wealthy, particularly billionaires, saw their net worths RISE by 6.5 trillion. Yes, you’re understanding that correctly: every worker in America who lost wages could have instead seen their waged double, while billionaires would have kept every single penny they had before the pandemic. But of course, that’s not the America we live in.

The America we live in saw the lowest paid workers hit the hardest, and remain the most damaged throughout the economic recovery - with Black women, Hispanic women, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders seeing disproportionately high losses, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which blames “occupational segregation”, or the fact that those demographic groups are extremely underrepresented in higher-paid management positions.

This economic reality reflects something we’ve known for decades, the systemic discrimination built into our labor market has clear and devastating effects, with white workers granted greater opportunity during economic growth, and shielded from the negative impacts of economic crises.

If you were doing well before the pandemic, you’re probably doing even better now - not only are you less likely to have permanently lost your job, but you also had the opportunity to dramatically increase your net worth by having money to invest at the bottom of the crisis. On the other hand, if you were struggling pre-pandemic, you were more likely to have been forced in a dangerous position as a so-called “essential worker” to be sacrificed to make sure that the economy didn’t collapse, and you were also more likely to permanently lose your job, or see a reduction in your pay - not to mention that because of steadily growing inflation, even if your income remained the same, it’s worth less now.

Every study in the aftermath of what we’re, for some reason, calling the “post-pandemic economic recovery”, even though the pandemic is still killing 2,000 Americans every day, but I digress, every study about the recovery shows that there WAS no recovery for the working class - in fact, they’re doing worse than ever. But hey, at least it means billionaires finally get to go play horsey in space just like they always wanted while the rest of us face mass eviction and poverty back here on earth.