That destruction is due to the adoption of the fake fiat money system and abandonment of the last vestiges of the gold standard in 1971. From David Stockman at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:
Since money-printing went into permanent high gear after the dotcom crash in 2000, the top 1 percent of households have gained $20 million each in inflation-adjusted net worth.
Likewise, the top 0.1 percent or 131,000 households at the tippy top of the economic ladder have gained $88 million each in inflation-adjusted net worth.
Needless to say, the net worth gains available to the wage-earning classes are almost exclusively from what they manage to save after absorbing the relentlessly rising cost of living. And we do mean relentless. Even though the CPI tends to undermeasure the cost of living on Main Street owing to its flaky hedonics’ adjustments for “quality” and other statistical razzmatazz, this imperfect proxy for the cost-of-living is still up by 82 percent since the turn of the century.
Accordingly, during the last 22 years the median real annual wage, as tracked by Social Security payroll tax records, has risen by only 14.5 percent or just $235 per annum. And, no, we didn’t omit any zeros from that figure. These piddling gains amount to just $4.50 per week on average.
These annual inflation-adjusted gains in the median wage compare to real net worth gains of nearly $1 million and $4 million per annum for the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent, respectively. In relative terms, these annual wealth gains for the top 1 percent were 4,250X larger than the median real wage gain and 17,000X larger for the top 0.1 percent.
