Read more. In the second quarter of , the share of net wealth in the United States held by the top 10 percent increased slightly from the previous quarter to 70 percent.
At the beginning of , this figure stood at During this period, the wealth share of the 90th to 99th percentile remained broadly constant at around 37 percent, while the share of the top one percent increased from You need a Single Account for unlimited access. Full access to 1m statistics Incl. Single Account. View for free. Show source. Show detailed source information?
Register for free Already a member? Log in. More information. Supplementary notes. Other statistics on the topic. Economy The richest people in America Economy Number of people with wealth over one million U. Isabel V. Liquidity, or the amount of assets easily convertible to cash, is an important concept when evaluating household financial well-being. For example, money put into a savings account is liquid, thus it is readily available if a household needs to cover an emergency expense.
Some politicians are using a similar line. The remaining 27 percent said they would cover the expense through such means as putting it on a credit card and paying it off over time, borrowing from a friend or family member, selling something, or taking out a loan. In fact, another study found that 6 in 10 Americans do not have enough saved to cover three months of expenses. While wealth inequality is certainly an important story, there are also important differences in wealth accumulation by age.
Age-based wealth inequality has increased over time. From to , the median net worth of families with a head of household age 65 or older increased by 68 percent. Over that same time period, the median net worth of families with a head of household age 35 or younger decreased by 25 percent. Two additional issues need to be kept in mind when thinking about generational wealth inequality. First, the average value of education loans held by younger families has increased by a factor of seven over this period.
In other words, in principle, the payoff to higher education through higher wages over a career should be counted as well. Although the returns to higher education remain positive , they vary a lot by whether a student completes college, the type of school they attend, what they major in, and family background. In addition, these measures of net worth do not capture the value of government benefits. Projected growth in real federal spending over the next decade is concentrated in areas that benefit older families , such as Social Security and health care.
At the same time, spending on younger families, such as investments in children, is projected to fall as a share of the federal budget. These two trends, plus large projected growth in net interest payments , mean that younger families will not only have less wealth but will be expected to pay for debt-financed federal spending that has mainly benefited prior generations.
That is more than all the goods and services produced in the U. The matter may not be entirely settled, however, as an opposing viewpoint suggests that income inequality does not harm economic opportunity. This report presents estimates of income inequality based on household income as estimated in the Current Population Survey CPS , a survey of households conducted by the U. Census Bureau in partnership with the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
These estimates refer to gross pretax income and encompass most sources of income. A key omission is the value of in-kind services received from government sources.
Because income taxes are progressive and in-kind services also serve to boost the economic wellbeing of poorer recipients, not accounting for these two factors could overstate the true gap in the financial resources of poorer and richer households.
The Congressional Budget Office CBO offers an alternative estimate of income inequality that accounts for federal taxes and a more comprehensive array of cash transfers and in-kind services than is possible with Current Population Survey data. By either estimate, income inequality in the U. Findings from other researchers show the same general rise in inequality over this period regardless of accounting for in-kind transfers.
Yet another alternative is to focus on inequality in consumption, which implicitly accounts for all forms and sources of incomes, taxes and transfers. Some estimates based on consumption show that inequality in the U. Empirically, consumption can be harder to measure than income. The growth in income in recent decades has tilted to upper-income households.
At the same time, the U. This downsizing has proceeded slowly but surely since , with each decade thereafter typically ending with a smaller share of adults living in middle-income households than at the beginning of the decade. The decline in the middle-class share is not a total sign of regression. On balance, there was more movement up the income ladder than down the income ladder. But middle-class incomes have not grown at the rate of upper-tier incomes.
Incomes are expressed in dollars. More tepid growth in the income of middle-class households and the reduction in the share of households in the middle-income tier led to a steep fall in the share of U. These trends in income reflect the growth in economic inequality overall in the U.
Even among higher-income families, the growth in income has favored those at the top. This disparity in outcomes is less pronounced in the wake of the Great Recession but shows no signs of reversing. Since , just seven men have held this spot: shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig , oil executive Gordon Getty , Walmart founder Sam Walton , media company owner John Kluge , Microsoft founder Bill Gates , except , investor Warren Buffett , and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos In , the tax share of the top.
That share peaked in the late s, right before the Great Depression, then fell by more than half over the next three decades. But the equalizing trends of the mid 20th century have now been almost completely undone. Most of the wealth of Americans in the bottom 90 percent comes from their homes — the asset category that took the biggest hit during the Great Recession. Put differently, the median White family has 41 times more wealth than the median Black family and 22 times more wealth than the median Latino family.
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