America has never been wealthier: which is why you're flat broke.

What $199 Trillion in Wealth Won’t Tell You

Earlier this week, I laid out what I called The Great Extraction—the story of how the American economy stopped rewarding builders, started rewarding bottlenecks, and slowly turned its citizens into product, payment stream, and yield.

I wrote that “nobody gets rich making things anymore.” The game had changed, ownership was disappearing, and value now flowed not to those who produced but to those who extracted.

Well, this week, the Congressional Budget Office confirmed all of it.

In raw numbers, America looks wealthier than ever.

In 2022, total family wealth in the United States hit $199 trillion—nearly eight times the GDP. The average family is worth $1.5 million on paper, and the median family now clocks in at just over half a million dollars.

It sounds like prosperity.

But this isn't wealth. It's concentration.

The new Congressional Budget Office report on wealth¹ from 1989 to 2022 paints a picture that’s both staggering and hollow:

• The top 10% now control 60% of all wealth, up from 56% in 1989.

• The top 1% alone hold 27%, up from 23%.

• The bottom 50% still hold just 6%—unchanged in 33 years. And those numbers are generous. Once you strip out the projected value of future Social Security benefits—a number that assumes political will and solvency you’d be unwise to bet on—the bottom half’s share drops to 3%.

That’s not a functioning economy. That’s economic necrosis: the illusion of motion in a dying limb.

The Social Security Illusion

One of the most chilling lines in the report is this:

“Social Security wealth accounted for almost half of the assets of families in the bottom 25 percent of the distribution.”

Read that again. The poorest families in America don’t hold wealth. They hold promises. They are not economic stakeholders—they are beneficiaries of a political IOU. And if that IOU is reduced or revoked—as the CBO quietly reminds us, it could be by 2034, when the trust fund runs dry—those families lose nearly half their economic existence.

This is the true face of post-capitalist inequality: A permanent underclass whose 'wealth' is future benefit streams that can be frozen, cut, or privatized at will.

The Extraction Continues

From 1989 to 2022, total wealth quadrupled. But not all boats rose.

• The top 10% gained $90 trillion.

• The bottom half gained $9 trillion—a tenth of that, in a country of 330 million people.

• Even during the pandemic, when emergency stimulus briefly lifted median wealth, the structure held: the bottom’s relative share never moved.

The report doesn’t editorialize. It doesn’t need to. The math tells the story.

I wrote in yesterday’s post:

“This system isn’t built for prosperity. It’s built for extraction.”

The CBO doesn't use that word—extraction. But you can see it in the numbers. From 1989 to 2022:

• The bottom half's share of total wealth stayed flat at 6%.

• The top 1% gained 4 percentage points, rising from 23% to 27%.

• The middle class lost ground, dropping from 37% to 33%.

Productivity went up. Wealth multiplied fourfold. But the benefits?
They went up, not out.

We have created an economy that requires the appearance of prosperity to function—one that floats on asset bubbles, deferred promises, and wealth that is increasingly financialized and inaccessible to most people.

In describing The Great Extraction, I wrote:

“You don’t own your music—you stream it.
You don’t own your software—you subscribe to it.
You don’t even fully own your car—features are locked behind monthly payments.”

The CBO, in its bloodless way, just gave us the balance sheet version of that truth.

The bottom 50% of Americans? Their "wealth" is mostly not wealth at all. It’s a promise—a future stream of Social Security payments that can be legislated away.

Meanwhile, the top 10% hold 60% of real wealth. Exclude Social Security, and that number climbs to 69%. This isn’t a safety net—it’s a synthetic wealth floor to keep the illusion of inclusion alive.

The Quiet Future

This report is the data artifact future historians will cite when they write about the fall of the American middle class. It’s a quiet document. No headlines. No viral graphs. Just numbers.

But behind those numbers is a warning: When most people’s “wealth” isn’t wealth—but debt-adjusted home equity, 401(k) balances, and Social Security projections—you don’t have a stable economy. You have a brittle one.

And brittle systems don’t bend. They snap.

So when I say you’re the yield, I’m not speaking metaphorically.

You are the yield.

The system assigns you a theoretical slice of the pie—Social Security benefits, 401(k) projections, rising home equity—and calls it wealth. But you don’t control it. You can’t liquidate it. You can’t trade it or lend against it in most cases. And it can be revoked with the stroke of a congressional pen.

Meanwhile, real wealth—liquid, scalable, power-generating wealth—has become increasingly difficult to attain.

You’re not crazy for feeling like you’re doing everything right and still falling behind.

You are.

Because this system isn’t broken.

It’s functioning exactly as designed.

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PS: Coming in Next Wednesday’s The Brief (for paid subscribers)

I'll explain what the CBO report tells us about the post-2034 economy—what happens when the Social Security “wealth” on these books becomes politically untenable, and what this means for family security, generational transfers, and the illusion of middle-class stability.

1. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60807