Great news, if you’re already wealthy! Wealth in the U.S. is growing—if you’re already wealthy. The Wall Street Journal reports, “The top 1% of households have more than twice as much as they did in 2003.” The picture isn’t so bright in the bottom 50% of households, though, which “have only recently regained the wealth lost in the 2007-2009 recession and still have 32% less wealth, adjusted for inflation, than in 2003.”
A big part of the reason for this divergence in the wealth picture is that rich people own stocks and bonds and chunks of private companies, while the main assets of not-so-rich people are likely to be their houses, and it just so happens that the (rigged) economy of the past couple of decades just so happens to favor the kind of wealth held by the wealthy. By this point, lower- and middle-income families struggle to even buy a home.
One thing The Wall Street Journal doesn’t mention here is race, but it’s a powerful driver of wealth inequality. Black families in particular remain disadvantaged, when it comes to building wealth, by having been redlined for generations. Racial income inequality also feeds the wealth gap, but whatever you attribute it to, the gap is serious:
This is why policies that tinker around the edges of our economy without making big changes are not enough.