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Wealth Inequality in America

• Not only do the bottom 20% and the next 20%, the bottom 40% of Americans barely have any of the wealth.
• the top 1% has more of the country’s wealth than 9 out of 10 Americans believe the entire top 20% should have.
• The ideal we asked everyone about: We’ve got some incentive, as the wealthiest folks are now about 10 to 20 times better off than the poorest Americans. But, hey, even the poor folks aren’t actually poor, since the poverty line has stayed almost entirely off the chart. We have a super healthy middle class, with a smooth transition into wealth. And yes, Republicans and Democrats alike chose this curve. Nine out of ten people, 92%, said this was a nice, ideal distribution of America’s wealth.
• How people think the reality looks like: the rich and wealthy are making, roughly, 100 times that of the poorest Americans and about 10 times that of the still healthy middle class.
• The actual distribution of wealth in America: The poorest Americans don’t even register. They’re down to pocket change. And the middle class is barely distinguishable from the poor. In fact, even the rich, between the top 10 and 20 percentile, are worse off. Only the top 10% are better off. And how much better off? So much better off that the top 2% to 5% are actually off the chart, at this scale. And the top 1%? his stack of money stretches 10 times higher than we can show.
• 1% of America has 40% of all the nation’s wealth. The bottom 80%, 8 out of every 10 people, or 80 out of these 100 only has 7% between them, and this has only gotten worse in the last 20 to 30 years.
• The top 1% own half the country’s stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. The bottom 50% of Americans own only half a percent of these investments, which means they aren’t investing.
• The average worker needs to work more than a month to earn what the CEO makes in one hour.