For top 0.1%, it has risen by $4 million.
For top 0.01%, it has risen $20 million.
Bottom 50%? $8,000.
Income of Top 1% Has Grown 100 Times Faster Than Bottom 50% Since 1970.
The wealth of the top 0.1% is five times larger than it was in 1970, while that of the top 0.01% is seven times larger, at over $24 million in 2018.
Stanford University economist Gabriel Zucman, explains, "People have this idea that government redistribution has upset some of the rise in inequality, but essentially that's not the case."
"You have two trends reinforcing each other," Zucman said. "There has been the rise in market income inequality—the rise in pretax income inequality. At the same time, the tax system has become much less progressive at the top of the income distribution."
New York Times columnist David Leonhardt published a graphic showing how in 2018, for the first time in U.S. history, the 400 richest Americans paid less in taxes than any other income group.
The richest Americans have benefited from numerous changes to tax laws and enforcement in recent decades, Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent wrote, "including domestic and international tax avoidance, the whittling away of the estate and corporate taxes, and the repeated downsizing of top marginal rates."
Tony Annett of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University wrote that Zucman's research shows how "it is no longer meaningful to rely on GDP" as a measure of economic well-being, since the benefits of growth are no longer being shared among all earners as they were in previous eras.
Seth D. Michaels of the Union of Concerned Scientists described Zucman's findings as showing how many people of his generation have seen the bulk of economic growth "captured and concentrated in a few hands...The tiny number of people raking in the overwhelming majority of the last 40 years of economic growth are distorting the economy and the political system like a black hole, everything falling toward their interests at high speed."
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