OWS organizer: 0.5 percent of the wealth of "one percenters" could end U.S. poverty more cheaply than welfare

It costs more to keep poverty than it would cost to eliminate it, says author and Occupy Wall Street organizer David DeGraw.

The writer told Acronym TV in a recent interview that his own research had convinced him that guaranteed income was the most effective way to fix wealth inequality.

DeGraw told host Dennis Trainor Jr. that it would cost just 0.5 percent of the wealth currently held by the top 1 percent “to eliminate poverty nationwide.”

“If people would just wrap their head around the fact that we have $94 trillion of wealth in this country, I think we would have a revolution overnight,” DeGraw said.

At least 40 percent of the wealth held by the 1 percent is sitting idle, he said – so there is “an astonishing $13 trillion in wealth hoarded away, unused.”

“Having that much wealth consolidated within a mere 1 percent of the population, while a record number of people toil in poverty and debt, is a crime against humanity,” he said.

DeGraw said negative effects of poverty, such as increased health care costs and costs associated with crime, already cost more than it would to simply pay $40,000 a year to every non-millionaire household or $35,000 to every working-age person.

“The cost of poverty is more than the cost of eliminating poverty,” he said.