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to what has become the fallback for many:
asking strangers on the Internet for help.
A $25 donation from a new Twitter friend
paid for groceries; funds from another Twit-
ter user, coupled with Robinson’s stimulus
payment, covered April rent. As May ap-
proached, she was again out of money. “I
literally have to choose which medications
are most important and which I can get
by without taking,” she told me recently.
One of the drugs to treat her lupus, hy-
droxychloroquine, has gotten harder to
find since President Donald Trump touted
it as a potential treatment for COVID-19.
The wealthy have never faced these im-
possible choices, but as more Americans
do, the U.S. economy comes to resemble
a game of chutes and ladders, where the
richest are steadily climbing ever higher
while workers without stable jobs, incomes
or savings are sent plummeting downward.
It will be more difficult than ever for them
to catch up or to even stay in the game,
given their disadvantages going in.After dipping in eArly MArch, the
stock market has nearly returned to where
it was in December, allowing the wealthiest
tenth of Americans, who own 84% of all
stocks, to breathe a sigh of relief. The 10%
also had reasons to cheer the CARES Act,
which Congress passed on March 27 with
a tweak to the tax code that primarily ben-
efits hedge-fund investors and owners of
real estate businesses. Banks handling the
government’s $349 billion small- business
loan program collected more than $10 bil-
lion in fees, according to NPR.
The Betancourts, meanwhile, worry
that if their son can’t keep paying his
college tuition, he’ll lose his chance at
a degree and be bumped back into the
same economic category as his parents.
America is still known to immigrants as
the land of opportunity. But among ex-
perts who study its economy, it has be-
come the land of income inequality. Ep-
ochal changes that lifted billions out of
poverty— globalization, technology—
also served to concentrate wealth in the
hands of a few. Meanwhile, the U.S. has
decided over time to allow a greater share
of money to stay in private hands, and to
collect less for the common good.
When adjusted for inflation, the wages
of workers in the bottom tenth of the U.S.
economy have risen just 3% since 2000,
while those in the top tenth have risenPHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDRE D. WAGNER FOR TIME