The economy isn't getting better for most Americans. But there is a fix [View all]

[BeckyDem]

Heather Boushey


US economic data leaves us in the dark. If we don’t change the way we measure such progress, we’re unlikely to have much of it
Read our entire Broken capitalism series


The economy is getting bigger, but not better. Not for most Americans, anyway. In the United States, additional income from productivity and growth has been going mostly to those at the top of the income and wealth ladder. Between 1979 and 2016, the US national income grew by nearly 60%, but after accounting for taxes and transfers, the bottom half of the income distribution experienced incomes rising by 22%, while those in the top 10% had income gains that were almost five times as much – 100%.

As income inequality widens, it’s calcified into some at the top accumulating larger and larger stocks of assets – money, but also property, stocks, bonds and other kinds of capital. In the United States, the distribution of wealth is even more severely unequal than income. Since 1979, wealth gains at the top have grown even faster than income; those in the top 1% now control about 40% of all wealth in the US economy, and the top 0.1% control more than 20% – three times as much as the late 1970s.

To put this into raw numbers, there are 160,000 families in the United States who hold more than $20m in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available, and their average wealth was $72m. This group’s share of wealth was almost equal to that of the bottom 90% of Americans.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/01/broken-capitalism-economy-americans-fix?CMP=share_btn_tw