The wealth inequality

In the United States, the three richest, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett,  own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent.

The 400 richest individuals now own more wealth than the bottom 64 percent of the population.

The wealthiest 25 individuals in the United States today own $1 trillion in combined assets, more wealth than the bottom 56 percent of the U.S. population combined, 178 million people."

One in five households have zero or negative net worth. Looking at this trend through the lens of race reveals that 30 percent of black households and 27 percent of Latino households have zero or negative wealth.

All combined, households in the bottom one percent have a combined negative net worth of $196 billion. For comparison, the top one percent, a category holding the exact same number of people, have positive $33.4 trillion in combined net worth.

 The new report (pdf) published Wednesday by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), Billionaire Bonanza 2017, said the U.S. is becoming "a hereditary aristocracy of wealth and power."

"Over recent decades, an incredibly disproportionate share of America's income and wealth gains has flowed to the top of our economic spectrum. At the tip of that top sit the nation's richest 400 individuals, a group that Forbes magazine has been tracking annually since 1982," write IPS's Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie, the report's authors. "Americans at the other end of our economic spectrum, meanwhile, watch their wages stagnate and savings dwindle."