Inequality
How concentrated US wealth is across households: top 1%, bottom 50%, and the shrinking middle.
A score of 0 means wealth is distributed evenly. 100 means extreme concentration. Components come from the Fed's Distributional Financial Accounts: the top 1%'s wealth share, the bottom 50%'s share, and the shrinking middle 40%. In 1990, the top 1% held around 22% of wealth and the bottom 50% held around 4%. Today those numbers are 31.7% and 2.5%. The hollowing of the middle is what pushes the score highest, more than gains at the very top alone.
Wealth vs population
Each row is divided into 4 cohorts. The top bar shows how the population splits. The bottom bar shows how the wealth splits. Proportionality would mean the bars look identical. They don't.
A typical person in the top 1% holds 634 times as much wealth as a typical person in the bottom 50%.
What 634× actually feels like
The per-person wealth ratio between a typical top-1% household and a typical bottom-50% household is 634×. That number is hard to picture on its own. Here is the same ratio translated into everyday scales.
The sky-blue sliver is so small it's practically invisible. That pixel-thin line next to the full rose bar is what 634× looks like when both numbers appear on the same scale. Normally charts use log axes or truncated baselines so both values can be read at once; that convention hides how extreme the ratio actually is.
taller than the Burj Khalifa (2,717 ft, the world's tallest building)
about a month of continuous waking
New York City to Detroit, round trip
what some families earn in a year
about 79 whole pizzas in one sitting
roughly the length of War and Peace (1,225 pages), halfway over
How long would it take to earn it?
At a $100,000 salary, saving every dollar and spending nothing, how many years of work each tier would take. The anchor on the right is the rough historical era that span reaches back to.
Human lifespan tops out near 80 years. Recorded history is about 5,000 years old. Agriculture is 12,000. Anything past that isn't "working hard for a long time." It's deep time: the kind of span where continents shift and species change. A salary-based path to Bezos doesn't exist on any timescale a human operates on.
The century-long U-shape
Wealth inequality in the US followed a U-shape across the 20th century. The top 1%'s share peaked during the Gilded Age and again before the Great Depression, collapsed into the post-war Great Compression, and has climbed back since 1980. We are now in territory we haven't seen since 1929.
Top 1% wealth share, 1913–today
Fed DFA (1989+) spliced with Saez-Zucman long-run estimates. Peak in 1929, trough in 1970s, climbing since.
Bottom 50% wealth share
Fed DFA. Fell below 1% during the 2009 crisis. Has rebuilt slightly since but remains historically low.
Middle 40% wealth share
Fed DFA. The hollowing of the middle class, measured directly. Shrunk from 36% to 29% since 1990.
How the US compares to peers
The Gini coefficient measures inequality of disposable income. 0 = everyone gets the same. 1 = one person has everything. The US sits higher than nearly every developed peer, closer to Mexico than to the Nordic countries.
The US Gini of 0.395 is about 50% higher than Denmark's. OECD studies find that the US began pulling away from peer countries in the early 1980s and has kept drifting since.
The life expectancy gap
Inequality doesn't stop at net worth. Chetty et al. studied 1.4 billion tax records to measure how long Americans live by income percentile. The gap between top and bottom is roughly 15 years for men and 10 years for women. That's a generation of difference between the 1st and 99th percentile.
| Income percentile | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| Top 1% | 87.3 yrs | 88.9 yrs |
| Top 25% | 85.2 yrs | 87.8 yrs |
| Middle | 81.3 yrs | 84.2 yrs |
| Bottom 25% | 76.8 yrs | 81.1 yrs |
| Bottom 1% | 72.7 yrs | 78.8 yrs |
Even more striking: in richer US counties, life expectancy for the poorest quartile kept rising 2001-2014. In poorer counties, it didn't. Geography, income, and wealth compound to determine how long you live.
Racial wealth gap
Median household net worth by race from the Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances. A typical white household holds about 6× the wealth of a typical Black household. The gap widens at the mean because of inherited wealth and asset ownership patterns.
Why the gap? A typical white household owns a home with ~30 years of equity, plus retirement accounts, plus inheritances accumulated across generations. The same wealth-building channels were legally blocked to Black families (redlining, GI Bill exclusion, discriminatory lending) until the 1970s. Two generations of post-Civil-Rights-Act progress haven't closed a 300-year gap.
Healthcare cost burden vs peers
Americans pay far more of their economy to the healthcare system than any peer country. Outcomes for the bottom quartile are measurably worse. The extra spending flows largely to insurers, pharma middlemen (PBMs), and hospital administrators rather than patient care.
At 17.3% of GDP, the US spends about 5 percentage points more than Germany or France and gets worse population-level outcomes for it. The delta is roughly $1.4 trillion per year above peer-country norms. That's money that could be wages or savings.
Case study: the first family
Inequality at the 0.01% level shows up as specific transactions. This is a single household's balance sheet over a decade of political proximity. Between them Donald Trump and Jared Kushner are worth around $7.2B today, up from roughly $4B at the start of the first term. The chart shows the step-changes; the notes underneath show the mechanisms.
Net worth of the first family (2016 – today)
Forbes real-time billionaires tracker. Intra-year samples where events moved the number. Values in $ billions.
Trump Media (DJT)
A loss-making social-media company with negligible revenue reverse-merged onto the Nasdaq in March 2024, days before the primaries wrapped up. Trump's 60%+ stake was worth $5B+ at peak. Any Trump supporter who wanted to funnel money to him could do so legally by buying DJT stock. The company has never been profitable. Its value is the candidate attached to it.
TRUMP memecoin
Launched January 17, 2025, three days before the second inauguration. The Trump-controlled entity holds 80% of the supply. Buyers (often anonymous wallets, often foreign) pump billions into a token whose value accrues to the family. Traditional bribery laws don't easily reach crypto transfers of this shape. Ethics watchdogs have flagged it as the largest legalized influence-purchase mechanism in US history.
Saudi PIF → Affinity Partners
Six months after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner launched a private equity firm with no PE track record and received a $2B anchor commitment from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. PIF's own advisors reportedly recommended against the investment, citing Kushner's inexperience, thin operations, above-market fees, and "public relations concerns." The board approved it anyway. During the preceding administration, Kushner ran Middle East policy and cultivated a close relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Foreign payments to Trump properties
The House Oversight Committee documented at least $7.8M in payments from 20+ foreign governments to Trump-owned properties during the first term, from Trump Hotel DC to Mar-a-Lago. The Emoluments Clause cases seeking disclosure were dismissed as moot when Trump left office in 2021. The properties that received the money are still owned by the same family.
"I wasn't planning to go into politics." Jared Kushner said a version of that line repeatedly before and during the 2016 campaign. His father, Charles Kushner, had served 14 months in federal prison for tax evasion, witness tampering, and illegal campaign contributions. The kind of record that usually disqualifies a family from federal appointments. In 2017, the Trump White House interpreted the anti-nepotism statute as applying only to appointments with a confirmable Senate role, which is how Jared Kushner became a senior adviser running Middle East policy, Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, and the federal pandemic response. By 2020 he was a Forbes billionaire. By 2022, via the Saudi PIF commitment, he was an anchor limited partner in his own fund.
None of the transactions above were illegal. That is the point. The wealth mechanisms that move a single family by billions per year (SPAC-listed vanity stocks, memecoins sold to anonymous buyers, foreign sovereign wealth commitments to a newly-launched fund) do not exist for wage-earning households. They are the infrastructure of concentrated wealth at the level this page measures.
Your year vs their seconds
Enter your annual salary. The number below is the equivalent slice of a top billionaire's accumulated wealth. Large numbers stop feeling real past a point. Time makes them real again.
For reference: humans have existed for roughly 300,000 years. Agriculture is about 12,000 years old. A single person now holds enough wealth that, at a median US salary, it would take longer than recorded civilization to earn by labor. The distribution isn't a bell curve. It's a power law with a long, absurd tail.
The K-shaped economy
From 2010 through 2019, the economy was roughly coherent. Assets and incomes all climbed at similar-enough rates that wealth, housing, and paychecks tracked together. Then in 2020 the picture split. People who owned assets (stocks, houses) saw their wealth leap. People who earned a paycheck saw real wages barely move. That divergence is the shape of a letter K: the upper arm rising, the lower arm flat. The chart below indexes everything to January 2010 = 100 so the pre-COVID baseline is visible.
Upper arm: asset owners
Since 2020, the S&P 500 nearly doubled. Home prices jumped 50%+. Anyone holding stocks or real estate got much wealthier in nominal terms, and meaningfully wealthier in real terms after subtracting inflation. Wealth is overwhelmingly concentrated here. The top 10% of households own about 88% of stocks.
Lower arm: wage earners
Wages kept up with inflation on average but lost ground for several years. For the bottom 50% of earners, who hold almost no financial assets, purchasing power barely budged and in some months went backwards. Rent, groceries, and insurance rose faster than paychecks.
How it compounds into inequality
The K functions as a wealth-transfer mechanism. Asset inflation (driven by low rates, stimulus, and buybacks) boosts existing owners. Wage inflation catches up to price inflation, leaving most workers where they started. Over a decade, that's how the top 1%'s share of wealth rose from 22% to 32% while the bottom 50%'s share fell from 4% to 2.5%.
Volatility as a third arm
Sophisticated investors don't just ride the asset arm up. They also profit from the turbulence. Selling options earns premium during volatility. Market makers widen spreads when flows get chaotic. Private equity buys distressed assets at discounts. Hedge funds run long-vol strategies. Every rate-hike panic, tariff headline, and earnings miss becomes an income stream for anyone with the capital and access to harvest it.
For wage earners, the same volatility shows up as layoff risk, an ARM mortgage that resets higher, grocery prices that jump, 401(k) swings that drive panic-selling at the bottom, and an insurance premium that suddenly doubles. The wealthy trade volatility as a product. Everyone else absorbs it as stress.
1789 vs today
A favorite historical benchmark. In the decade before the French Revolution, wealth concentration hit levels that economic historians consider extreme even by pre-modern standards. The US today is not there, but it is closer than any period since the Gilded Age. Numbers below are from Piketty, Saez-Zucman, and Morrisson-Snyder for France, and the Fed's Distributional Financial Accounts for the US.
| Metric | France 1788 | US today | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top 1% wealth share | 45% | 31.7% | US is 70% of the way to 1789 France. |
| Top 10% wealth share | 82% | 68.1% | Still short of pre-Revolution concentration, but rising. |
| Bottom 50% wealth share | ~1% | 2.5% | Modern bottom 50% holds more than 18th-c. peasants, but not by much. |
| Top tier of society | 0.5% (nobility + clergy) | 0.1% (ultra-wealthy) | Fed DFA: top 0.1% holds more wealth than the entire bottom 80%. |
| Share of food in household budget (bottom half) | ~50% | ~30% | A bad harvest in 1788 meant starvation. Today a grocery spike still bites. |
What happened next (in France)
Revolutions are not inevitable at any particular inequality level. Plenty of societies have been more unequal and remained stable. Historians do note a recurring recipe that preceded political rupture across centuries and continents: extreme wealth concentration, elite disconnection from daily life, falling real incomes at the bottom, and a visible spark (bread prices in 1789, housing and healthcare costs today).
Where do you land?
Enter your household net worth (assets minus debts) to see where you sit in the US wealth distribution. Based on Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances percentiles.
You're wealthier than about 65.5M US households.
About 65.5M households are wealthier than you.
The bottom 50% of US households (65 million homes) collectively hold 2.5% of all US wealth. Most of their net worth is in home equity and vehicles, not financial assets.
Estate tax across eras
The estate tax applies once, on death. In 1960 the top rate was 77% and only the first $60K was exempt. Today the top rate is 40% and the first $14M passes untaxed. For a $230B estate the exemption is a rounding error, so the rate does the lifting.
| Era | Top rate | Exemption | Tax on $230B | vs today |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Eisenhower 1954-1963 | 77% | $60K | $177.1B | +$85.1B |
Pre-Reagan 1970-1980 | 70% | $175K | $161.0B | +$69.0B |
Reagan / Clinton 1993-2012 | 55% | $600K | $126.5B | +$34.5B |
Today 2018-present | 40% | $14.0M | $92.0B |
The estate tax was designed to prevent dynastic concentration of wealth. It was aggressive for most of the 20th century. Since 2001 it has been steadily defanged: rate cut, exemption raised 250×, and a toolbox of structures (step-up in basis, dynasty trusts, GRATs, intentionally defective grantor trusts) lets large estates legally avoid most of what's left.
How billionaires avoid it all
The estate-tax table above shows what Bezos would owe at the statutory 40% rate. Almost no billionaire actually pays that, and most pay close to nothing on their lifetime wealth growth. The playbook is three steps, each one legal, each one disclosed on a tax return. Together they make the effective tax rate on billionaire wealth roughly zero across a lifetime.
Hold appreciating assets
Founders and long-term holders keep stock, real estate, and private equity. Wealth grows through paper appreciation ("unrealized gains"), which the IRS does not tax until you sell. A $100B fortune can exist on a tax return as almost zero income.
Borrow against them
Banks offer securities-backed lines of credit (SBLOCs, pledged-asset loans) at low rates against a portfolio. Cash flows out to fund any lifestyle; no sale means no capital gains tax. Interest is cheap, sometimes deductible, and debt is not income.
Reset the basis on death
At death, inherited assets get a "step-up in basis": the cost basis resets to the market value on the date of death. Every embedded gain, decades of appreciation, evaporates untaxed forever. Heirs can sell the next day with zero capital gains owed.
Step 1 in action. Federal income tax tops out at 37% and carries a second layer of payroll tax. Billionaires don't take salaries, they take equity. Their actual 10-Ks reveal the pattern.
In 2021 ProPublica obtained 15 years of IRS returns for the richest Americans. From 2014 to 2018, the top 25 billionaires saw their wealth grow by $401B and paid $13.6B in federal income tax, a "true tax rate" of 3.4%.
Step-up in basis is the keystone. Remove it and Buy-Borrow-Die collapses: heirs would owe capital gains on the decades of appreciation, and the loan has to be repaid from something. Closing that one loophole was estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to raise $124B over a decade and was briefly part of Biden's 2021 "American Families Plan" before dying in negotiation. It is the single most consequential line of the tax code when it comes to dynastic wealth.
Earners and owners
Prof. Ray Madoff calls this the "second estate" in her 2025 book, a reference to pre-revolutionary France, where the aristocracy was explicitly written out of the tax code. Her argument: the US code has quietly recreated the same two-tier structure. People whose money arrives as a paycheck pay almost everything. People whose money arrives as appreciation, inheritance, or equity pay almost nothing. The boundary isn't income level; it's form.
Where the split shows up
Each row is the same underlying act. The left column is how the tax code treats an earner doing it; the right is how it treats an owner.
Salary, wages, tips. Taxed immediately, withheld from each paycheck.
Stock that goes up in value (unrealized gains) is never taxed. If you borrow against it instead of selling, it is never taxed at all.
Find $100 on the street and federal law requires you to report it as income. Even prize money from a game show is taxable.
Inheritances are tax-free to the recipient. In 2024 a beneficiary could receive $14M from a parent's estate and owe no federal tax; estates above that pay a much-gamed 40%.
About 90% of Americans take the standard deduction, so a donation carries zero tax savings for them.
A top-bracket donor in a high-tax state can receive tax savings worth up to 74 cents per dollar donated, effectively turning private foundations into subsidized wealth-storage vehicles.
Why nothing has changed
The estate tax used to be actively maintained. Congress added the generation-skipping transfer tax in 1986 and four "special valuation" sections in 1990 to block common avoidance techniques, both under Republican presidents. Since 1990, not one loophole has been closed. The rate stayed on the books; the enforcement arm atrophied. The tax now functions mostly as political cover: 40% on paper, closer to 15-20% in practice after step-up basis, dynasty trusts, GRATs, and valuation discounts do their work.
What would actually fix it
Tax unrealized gains when property is sold, gifted, or inherited
Closes the step-up-in-basis loophole at the one moment every fortune has to move. Canada has done this for decades. Nixon proposed it in 1969; Obama in 2021. CBO scored a version at $124B over ten years.
Bring inherited wealth into the normal income tax
Today a $100M inheritance is reported by no one. Taxing it as ordinary income to the recipient would apply the same rules earners already live under, and would let the separate, gamed estate-tax regime be retired.
Replace the deduction with a flat credit
A fixed credit per dollar donated would give a $60K household and a $60M household the same benefit for the same gift. Currently only the latter sees meaningful tax savings, which is why philanthropy reinforces rather than offsets wealth concentration.
The owner class holds 25× the annual deficit and 7× annual federal spending. The claim that "we can't afford" core services is a claim about political choice, not arithmetic.
How to fight back
Wealth inequality is a policy outcome. The Nordic countries, Japan, and post-war America all show that more equal distributions are possible without sacrificing growth. The levers below are the ones economists (across ideological lines) consistently identify as moving the needle. Ranked roughly from highest per-dollar impact on the Gini.
Universal services
Single-payer healthcare, free college/trade school, and subsidized childcare. The US spends 17% of GDP on healthcare for worse outcomes than peers that spend 11%. Universal access to these services closes inequality gaps faster than cash transfers because they address costs that compound across a lifetime.
Tax policy
Bring the top marginal income-tax rate closer to historical norms (pre-1981: 70%+). Tax capital gains at the same rate as labor income above a threshold. Restore the estate tax to pre-2001 levels. Close the step-up basis loophole that lets inherited wealth skip capital gains tax entirely.
Housing
Housing is the biggest driver of wealth inequality for the middle 40%. Support zoning reform (multi-family, ADUs, eliminating parking minimums) so supply can actually respond to demand. Public and limited-equity housing for the bottom quartile. First-time-buyer programs that don't just inflate prices.
Electoral reform
Wealth inequality translates to political inequality through campaign finance and lobbying. Support public financing of elections, ranked-choice voting, independent redistricting commissions, and SCOTUS reform around Citizens United. Structural democratic reforms outlast any single policy.
Direct supports
The Earned Income Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit (pre-2022 expansion was the most effective anti-poverty program in decades), SNAP, and housing vouchers work. Expand them and index to cost of living. The 2021 expanded CTC cut child poverty in half in six months.
What you can do
- Vote in local elections. Mayor, city council, state legislature, school board, judges.
- Support housing reform in your municipality. Blocking new housing is a direct inequality vote.
- Donate to organizations that litigate and lobby on these issues (ACLU, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, regional legal aid).
- Talk about these numbers. Most people don't know the bottom 50% holds 2.5% of wealth. Data changes what's politically possible.
Inequality is not a left/right issue. Conservative economists from Milton Friedman to contemporary free-market thinkers have endorsed elements of this list: Friedman's negative income tax, the Mirrlees Review's consumption-tax approach, and cross-ideological support for zoning reform. The debate is over which levers match which values. Doing nothing preserves the trend lines above.
What moves the score
Historical context
US wealth inequality followed a U-shape over the 20th century. The top 1% held around 40% of wealth in 1920, dropped to around 22% by the 1970s (the "Great Compression"), and has climbed back since. We are now in territory not seen since before the Great Depression. What changed after 1980: tax cuts on top earners, deregulation of finance, stagnant minimum wages, decline of unions, offshoring of manufacturing, and the rise of asset-heavy industries (tech, finance, pharma). Each funneled a larger share of GDP to asset owners. The bottom 50% own disproportionately little financial wealth. Most of their net worth is in home equity and vehicles. When asset prices rise (stocks, housing), it mostly benefits the top 10%. When prices fall, the bottom 50% gets crushed harder because they have no cushion. Today the top 1% holds 31.7% of wealth. The bottom 50% holds 2.5%. The middle 40% has shrunk from 36% to 29.4% since 1990. That is the "middle class disappearing" that people feel.
Component breakdown
% of all US wealth held by the top 1%. Was ~22% in 1990. Higher = more extreme concentration.
% of wealth held by the bottom half of households. Was ~4% in 1990, now ~2.5%. Lower = more inequality.
Wealth held by the middle 40% (not top 10%, not bottom 50%). Shrinking = middle class being hollowed out.
Upper middle class: the 90th-99th percentile. Stable around 36-40% historically.
| Component | Value | Score | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
Top 1% wealth share concentration % of all US wealth held by the top 1%. Was ~22% in 1990. Higher = more extreme concentration. | 31.7 | 75 | 35% |
Bottom 50% wealth share concentration % of wealth held by the bottom half of households. Was ~4% in 1990, now ~2.5%. Lower = more inequality. | 2.50 | 57 | 30% |
Middle 40% wealth share distribution Wealth held by the middle 40% (not top 10%, not bottom 50%). Shrinking = middle class being hollowed out. | 29.4 | 83 | 20% |
Next 9% wealth share distribution Upper middle class: the 90th-99th percentile. Stable around 36-40% historically. | 36.4 | 40 | 15% |