You don’t necessarily need more money, just more flow. Imagine 20 people sitting in a circle, each with a colored stone in their left hand, and $20 in their right. Everyone gives the $20 to the person on the right, and takes the colored stone. Everyone gets the stone they wanted, and everyone paid with $20. Now imagine only one person has a $20… the same exchange happens, but it goes sequentially.

Now, and I’m not advocating the removal of all fat-cats and big-wigs and promoting a cookbook here, but where things get really fucked up is you have businesses and governments inserting themselves as the intermediary in every one of those exchanges, and siphoning a little for themselves. If, in our example, the stone costs $10, and a business siphons $0.55 from each exchange, it ends up with $11, and everyone else is now at $19.45. Repeat until the business has $209, and everyone else is at $9.55… It gets even worse if the exchange is sequential, where only $20 exists to begin with. Ideally you would have a wise government who controls the money taxing and managing the overall picture, but complicated doesn’t begin to describe it. We’ve made everyone start equal in our example, and all have the exact same exchange. You can expand with different skills and services and products as you want, like imagining a coal miner and a farmer trying to be in the same circle with an oil worker and shrimp fisher.

I’m just bullshitting here, but I’d bet the US is sitting somewhere around the $11-12 mark right now. More and more people are feeling the squeeze as the companies get closer to having all the power simply by having the resources to get what they want while the people can’t afford it.