Thursday, April 3, 2014

The Shocking Rise of Wealth Inequality: Is it Worse Than We Thought?

Click here to access article by Jordan Weissmann from Slate.

The author's examination of wealth and income data suggests some new insights about the growing gap between socio-economic classes in the US:
Forget the 1 percent. The winners of this race, according to Zucman and Saez, have been the 0.1 percent. Since the 1960s, the richest one-thousandth of U.S. households, with a minimum net worth today above $20 million, have more than doubled their share of U.S. wealth, from around 10 percent to more than 20 percent. Take a moment to process that. One-thousandth of the country owns one-fifth of the wealth. By comparison, the entire top 1 percent of households takes in about 22 percent of U.S. income, counting capital gains.