The great American tragedy of all time will forever be the enslavement of millions of Africans over 246 years and the government’s refusal for 160 years now to apologize and compensate their descendants.

The great tragedy of these times is the vast gulf between the tens of millions who live in poverty, struggling to make ends meet, and the few obscenely wealthy with their multimillion-dollar yachts, private jets, paintings and mansions.

And there is a link: As some historians have noted, the enslaved produced not only rice, sugar and tobacco but also cotton that made the enslavers rich and laid the foundation for the country’s economic dominance.

The richest Americans now own about $156 trillion or 98 percent of the country’s wealth. The rest own $4 trillion. The top 1 percent – 1.3 million families – are worth $49 trillion.

The annual income of 13 percent of the country’s 132 million households puts them below the Federal Poverty Line established during President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in 1963 and now at $15,650 for a single adult and $32,150 for a family of four. They qualify for federal aid.

But 29 percent of other households earn just enough to be above the poverty line but still cannot meet basic needs such as housing, child care, food, transportation, health care, technology, taxes and contingencies.

That means an overall 42 percent of Americans are having difficulties meeting their needs. They fall within the United for ALICE Threshold.

ALICE — Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed — is a non-partisan organization which United Way started in New Jersey in 2009, expanding to several states in partnership with United Way, hence United for ALICE. Its stated goal is “to raise awareness and advocate for solutions to help households struggling to afford basic needs.”

United for ALICE reports that, of the 15.7 million African American (“Black”) households, 9.1 million are within its Threshold; for the 82.8 million European American households, 30.8 million; for the 18.9 million Latino households, 9.8 million; for the 6.8 million Asian households, 2.3 million; for the 947,210 Indigenous People households, 518,710; for the 177,360 Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander households, 87,122; for the 14.4 million mixed-race households, 3.4 million; for the 18.1 million rural households, 8.5 million; for the 131 million urban households, 46 million.

“However,” United for Alice adds, “due to systemic racism, ageism, gender discrimination, and geographic barriers that limit many families’ access to resources and opportunities for financial stability, certain groups were more likely to experience hardship.” They include African Americans, Latino Americans, rural residents and households headed by people under age 25 (69 percent), or age 65 and over (55 percent), single-parent female headed households (77 percent) and single-parent male headed households (62 percent.)

In Florida, the United for ALICE Household Survival Budget is $33,804 for a single adult and $86,688 for a family of two adults and two children. Some 13 percent of the state’s population (1.1 million households) live below the poverty line and another 34 percent (three million households), while not in poverty, struggle to be able to meet basic needs. Taken together, 47 percent of Florida’s 8.9 million households or 4.1 million people, live below the ALICE Threshold, ranking it 48th in the country.

Still, as United for ALICE notes, “Workers below the ALICE Threshold often perform the jobs that keep our economy functioning smoothly,” such as “child care providers, food service workers, cashiers, personal care aides, delivery drivers and more. Their stories capture the systemic and structural barriers to financial stability and the struggles and resilience of families experiencing hardship.”

The ALICE Threshold for Miami-Dade County is about 51 percent, “meaning that 51 percent of households were either in, or one emergency away from, poverty” and “struggle to afford basic needs.” For Broward County, it is 47 percent.

(United for ALICE will hold its next National ALICE Summit on Jan. 5-7, 2026, at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. Registration details are available at UnitedforAlice.org.)

To make matters worse, a federal program that makes it possible for local farmers’ fresh produce to be sent to food banks is being ended, The Miami Herald reported on May 30. That will affect the region’s largest food bank, Feeding South Florida, which has been providing food to 1.2 million Floridians, or nearly two in 10 Floridians, The Herald reported.

“On any given day, roughly 400,000 Miamians — 13 percent of the county’s population — don’t know where their next meal will come from. Compounding that vulnerability are more cuts proposed to federal spending on food assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps, on which nearly three million Floridians rely,” The Herald added.

Despite this, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature which his party dominates have been focused on a “culture war” and debating issues such as what should be the state’s bird.

The wealth gap has widened during both Democratic and Republican administrations. Democrats have failed to effectively close it and Republicans have never been shy about wanting it to widen. The Republican ideology has taken new meaning with the second Trump presidency, including the injection of more of the super-rich into the running of the country.

That trend received a boost when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Jan. 21, 2010, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The ruling, as the Brennan Center for Justice has pointed out, “reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions and enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections.” Brennan Center noted that “wealthy donors, corporations, and special interest groups have long spent money on campaigns” but “their role has ballooned as a result of Citizens United and subsequent decisions, resulting in a fusion of private wealth and political power unseen since the late 19th century.”

With supercharged political campaign donations has come an era of the wealthy actually setting policy which obviously benefit them. An extreme example is President Donald Trump’s current bill now before the Congress which will maintain trillions of dollars in tax cuts mostly for the rich provided during his first administration and now further cuts to be paid for by substantial reductions to programs such as Medicaid. The president has claimed that his policies, including on tariffs, will lower the cost of living.

“The country as a whole has never been wealthier; at the start of 2025, the total assets held by American households reached a historic peak,” The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos wrote in the June 2 issue. “But these figures are skewed by giant fortunes at the top. Roughly half of Americans cannot afford a thousanddollar emergency expense, and the bottom two-thirds are nearly as pessimistic about their prospects as they were during the 2008 financial crisis.”

Osnos cites tax expert Bob Lord as saying, as Osnos puts it, “If the current economic trend continues, the effect will be severe. In the next four decades, the top 0.00001 percent of Americans (about 19 people, at current population) will increase their share of the nation’s wealth tenfold, from 1.8 percent to eighteen percent.”

And as the rich become richer, there is little evidence of any concern for the less well-off. In fact, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, whom the president had put in charge of downsizing the federal bureaucracy, has more wealth, as Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders recently noted, “than the bottom 50 percent of Americans,” describing it as “insane.”

Musk has dubbed Social Security “a Ponzi scheme” and has declared that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” – that is, concern for the less fortunate.

Osnos also notes the 18th century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rosseau’s comment that, in Osnos’ words, “in times of extreme inequality, the wealthy distracts those who might resent them by fostering a ‘mutual hatred and distrust, by setting the rights and interests of one against those of another.’” That certainly is taking place now.

The country may be heading towards an autocracy or an oligarchy, as Sanders and others insist, but those are terms which most Americans do not relate to. What they are concerned about is the cost of living and, as United for ALICE has noted, tens of millions of them are not doing well. It is surprising that Trump’s critics are not focusing more on that reality.