When you hear that six members of the Walton family have “more wealth than the bottom 30% of Americans…”

What do you think? Do you think: oh my God, that’s obscene! Or: oh my God, how do I do that?

Tim Worstall in Forbes writes:

Different people will take this different ways, but Jeffrey Goldberg tells us that six members of the Walton family (the original owners of Walmart) have more wealth than the bottom 30% of Americans.

Worstall links Goldberg, and excerpts:

In 2007, according to the labor economist Sylvia Allegretto, the six Walton family members on the Forbes 400 had a net worth equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans.

By the way: if your reaction was closer to the latter of those two choices, above, you’re probably a conservative.

Alternate test: if you wondered whether, just maybe, this guy Goldberg was leaving a little something out of his narrative, you’re probably a conservative. Worstall continues, explaining exactly that:

This sounds outrageous, until you stop for a second and take note of the fact that Jeffrey Goldberg, individually, has a net worth greater than the bottom 25% of all Americans.

In fact, given that I have equity in my home and no other debt than mortgage, I have, as is highly likely do all readers of these pages, more wealth than the bottom 25% of Americans added together. For as Felix points us to:

In 2009, roughly 1 in 4 (24.8%) of American households had zero or negative net worth, up from 18.6% in 2007, and 37.1% of households had net worth of less than $12,000, up from 30.0% in 2007.

Well, hell, in that case, I’m as wealthy as the bottom 25% of Americans. Maybe even the bottom 27%.