Since the late 1970s, the American economy has been quietly looted in plain sight. A landmark analysis by the RAND Corporation shows that tens of trillions of dollars in income that should have flowed to the bottom 90 percent instead migrated upward, pooling in the hands of the top 1 percent. This was not the result of laziness below or brilliance above. It was the outcome of deliberate choices that rewired the economy to reward ownership over work, extraction over contribution, and power over productivity.

That money did not vanish, and it did not trickle down. It was captured. It was folded into financial instruments, stock buybacks, speculative bubbles, and tax-sheltered fortunes. Communities that generated the wealth were left with shuttered factories, stagnant wages, decaying infrastructure, and permanent insecurity, while the gains were abstracted upward into spreadsheets and portfolios that never set foot on the shop floor, the classroom, or the neighborhood they were mined from.

This was not just hoarding; it was transformation. Wealth stopped being a tool for building and became a weapon for control. The same money extracted from workers was later used to break unions, deregulate industries, capture regulators, and bend politics toward capital. Labor was told to be grateful for scraps while watching its own productivity gains finance the erosion of its bargaining power. The system learned how to feed on itself.

The cruelty of this transfer lies in its invisibility. Nothing was stolen at gunpoint. No vaults were cracked. Instead, the rules were changed quietly, year after year, until an economy once capable of broadly shared prosperity became a machine that funnels growth upward and calls it efficiency. Median wages flatlined not because Americans stopped working hard, but because the rewards of that work were rerouted before they ever reached them.

Had income growth continued to be shared as it was in the decades after World War II, the typical American household today would be dramatically wealthier, more stable, and less afraid. Instead, we are told this is the natural order of things, that inequality is inevitable, and that concentration equals strength. But an economy that enriches a few by draining the many is not strong. It is brittle. And the $79 trillion siphoned upward since the 1970s is not just a statistic—it is the measure of what was taken from ordinary lives and repurposed to ensure they would never get it back.