United States of Inequality

The share of national income earned by the top 1 percent has more than doubled since 1979. The top 1 percent now make 81 times as much as the bottom 50 percent, whereas in 1980 it was 27 times as much.

As a consequence, the total household wealth of the top 1 percent of the population has gone from 7 percent in the late ’70s to 22 percent in 2012, which is not much less than the total wealth of the entire bottom 90 percent.

In the words of United Nations poverty expert Philip Alston, the United States of America is becoming “the world champion of extreme inequality.”