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The new report on wealth inequality comes from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. America's top 10% controls 60% of the wealth. The bottom half holds 6%.
Economic inequality in the United States has been steadily increasing since the 1980s as well and economists such as Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Peter Orszag, politicians like Barack Obama and Paul Ryan, and media entities have engaged in debates and accusations over the role of tax policy changes in perpetuating economic inequality.
For much of the past decade, policymakers and analysts have decried America's incredibly low savings rate, noting that U.S. households save a fraction of the money of the rest of the world.
Income inequality has fluctuated considerably since measurements began around 1915, declining between peaks in the 1920s and 2007 (CBO data [2]) or 2012 (Piketty, Saez, Zucman data [15]). Inequality steadily increased from around 1979 to 2007, with a small reduction through 2016, [2] [16] [17] followed by an increase from 2016 to 2018. [18]
A 2022 study in the American Economic Journal found that greater economic inequality in the United States than in Europe was not because of the nature of tax and transfer systems in the United States. The study found that the U.S. redistributes a greater share of its wealth to the bottom half of the income distribution than any European country.
Much of the reason that economic inequality is so stark in modern America is wage stagnation. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since 2009, the longest Congress has ever let it erode ...
Arguing about whether inequality has significantly increased seems like a real step backwards in recent years. The real debate should be about why and what to do about it.
A September 2014 report by the Economic Policy Institute claims wage theft is also responsible for exacerbating income inequality: "Survey evidence suggests that wage theft is widespread and costs workers billions of dollars a year, a transfer from low-income employees to business owners that worsens income inequality, hurts workers and their ...