Wall Street’s Meltdown Increased Wealth Concentration
Average Americans today aren’t hurting because the economy has stopped generating wealth. Average Americans are hurting because the wealth the economy is generating continues to cascade disproportionately to the top. Between 1983 and 2007, the nation’s richest 1 percent took in over one-third of the nation’s total gain in marketable wealth, over triple the 11.2 percent that went to the bottom 80 percent of the nation’s households. And since 2007 the top 1 percent of the nation’s households have seen their overall share of the nation’s wealth increase from 34.6 to 37.1 percent.