Six in Walmart clan have wealth equal to bottom 42 percent of America

Last year I wrote a blog post about this stunning fact: The richest six members of the Walton family (heirs to the Walmart fortune) have accumulated wealth equal to the entire bottom 30 percent of Americans.

Yes, six people with riches that match the combined wealth of nearly 100 million people.

But times have changed for the Walton clan. They’re even richer than before.

New figures show that the six heirs’ wealth rose from 2007-10 by 22 percent, to $89.5 billion. Those numbers were extrapolated from a Federal Reserve report, which received considerable media attention a few weeks ago because it found that the median American family lost 39 percent of its wealth in that same time period.

In 2007, the Walton family wealth was $73.3 billion, as large as the bottom 35 million families in the wealth distribution combined, or roughly equivalent to 100 million Americans combined.

And in 2010, the Walton family wealth was as large as the bottom 48.8 million families, or about 140 million Americans combined.

The six family members are those Waltons listed in Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans. They are children or children-in-law of the founders of Walmart.

The University of California-Berkeley’s Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics devised the figures based on the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances.

“During a period of massive destruction of wealth for typical families and even when their peers lost some ground, the Waltons were able to cash in,” wrote UCBerkeley labor economist Sylvia Allegretto on her blog.

“It seems what has been bad for the vast majority of Americans has been very good for the Waltons. As the company’s then-CFO said right before the start of the great recession ‘Tough times are actually a good time for Walmart.’ Looks like he was right.”

At the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-backed think tank, Josh Bivens’ blog noted that the 50^th anniversary of the opening of the first Walmart was celebrated earlier this month. The EPI analyst said that Walmart’s astounding half century of success is due to a business model that does not bode well for low-level employees.

“We have argued previously that Walmart is a useful archetype for trends in the larger American economy over the past three decades,” Bivens wrote. “Its enormous size and bargaining power has led to fabulous wealth for its owners (most notably the Walton family), while the compensation it pays its employees is generally low, even by retail standards; and the ubiquity of Walmart stores means that it is effectively the ‘marginal’ employer in many U.S. counties. And its role as this marginal employer often serves to drive down workers’ wages countywide.

“The three years of wealth data from 2007 to 2010 just provides an extreme example of how the economic fortunes of Walmart’s owners have diverged from those of typical American households.”