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G_j

(40,367 posts) Tue Aug 23, 2016, 10:11 AM Aug 2016

A New Report on America's Wealth Gap Shows Bernie Sanders is Right to Be Grumpy

http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/cb0-report-wealth-income-inequality

A new Congressional Budget Office report examining trends in family wealth confirms what most Americans know from experience: the poor are buried in debt, the middle class is stuck, and—shocker—the most wealthy are piling up all the green.

The report, released late last week, puts its findings simply: "the distribution [of wealth] among the nation's families was more unequal in 2013 than it had been in 1989." It lays out some stark figures: Families in the top 10 percent of wealth distribution now hold more than three-quarters of the nation's total family wealth. Those failing within the 51st to 90th percentiles owned less than a quarter of it. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent own just one percent of the total share.

Putting it into dollars, the CBO notes that the average wealth of the top 10 percent of families was $4 million compared to $36,000 for those in the 26th to 50th percentiles. The wealth of families in the bottom 25 percent was in the red, due to an average of about $13,000 in debt, up from around $1,000 in debt prior to the Great Recession. (CBO defines wealth as a family's assets—including business and home equities, other real estate holdings, financial securities, bank deposits, and pension accounts—minus its debts.)

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The report was conducted at the request of Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.). "The reality, as this report makes clear, is that since the 1980s there has been an enormous transfer of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the wealthiest people in this country," the former Democratic presidential candidate said in a statement. "There is something profoundly wrong when the rich keep getting richer and virtually everyone else gets poorer." Sanders also took to Twitter to condemn the wealth gap highlighted in the CBO report.