You are just beating on the fact that I based the comparison on the total rather than the mean GDP available to an individual.

But that was the point of my post, to compare the captured wealth to consumption. People always talk about how the wealthy are screwing the rest of us over and everything would be great if they weren't taking so much, but it turns out that consumption is also a huge portion of the economy. Total wealth in the US is on the order of $100 trillion (this includes all housing and so on). Consumption of several trillion dollars a year adds up to that pretty quick and seizing it all and turning it into circuses isn't going to go very far.

Which isn't to say I am against programs that result in wealth transfer, it just pays to try to look at things clearly.

Oh of course, I just think people have a tendency to overlook how much of our productivity directly gets consumed.

I'm not strongly tied to the language I used, I just find the comparison interesting.

Mostly agree, though I'd quibble (as did Simon Kuznets) that GDP is a poor metric for national income. The entire field of national income accounting is rather fraught.

Going back to Adam Smith, "Wealth is the annual produce and labour of the nation". Elsewhere he argues that "the sole use of money is to circulate consumable goods". As a man not given to short sentences, I recommend paying attention when he uses them.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_II...

Defining, and measuring, and allocating wealth has been a bit of a conundrum for the past 240+ years. And a while before by some reports.