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There is a political debate over the estate tax in the United States, which reduces inequality by taxing the estate of large quantities of wealth. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 doubled the exemption of estates by increasing the exemption from $5.49 million in 2017 to $11.18 million in 2018. [ 102 ]
The United States has the highest level of income inequality in the Western world, according to a 2018 study by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. The United States has forty million people living in poverty, and more than half of these people live in "extreme" or "absolute" poverty.
It was developed by Max O. Lorenz in 1905 for representing inequality of the wealth distribution. The curve is a graph showing the proportion of overall income or wealth assumed by the bottom x % of the people, although this is not rigorously true for a finite population (see below).
But not only is America getting richer, the CBO found, inequality became all the more pronounced over those three decades. In 2022, families in America's top 10% held 60% of all wealth, up from 56 ...
America's economy has exploded since 1989. Gross domestic product, which measures all of the goods and services produced in a year, grew from $9.9 trillion to $22.5 trillion from 1989 to 2023 ...
Inequality grew because the ones moving to the private sector would become wealthier in the city with a private-sector job, while the agricultural sector stayed stagnant. Once the transition was over, inequality was at its lowest because the final stages of growth were complete and everyone was sharing in the wealth generated.
The full recovery of wealth even while the economy has recovered only about half the jobs lost to the pandemic recession underscores what many economists see as America's widening economic inequality.
Paul Krugman argues that for the US the surge in inequality to date is mainly due to supersalaries but capital has nonetheless been significant too. And when the current generation of the 1% turn over their wealth to their heirs these become rentiers, people who live off accumulated capital.