A New Report on America's Wealth Gap Shows Bernie Sanders Is Right to Be Grumpy

A new Congressional Budget Office report examining trends in family wealth confirms what most Americans know from experience: The poor are buried in debt, the middle class is stuck, and—shocker—the most wealthy are piling up all the green.

The report, released late last week, puts its findings simply: "The distribution [of wealth] among the nation's families was more unequal in 2013 than it had been in 1989." It lays out some stark figures: Families in the top 10 percent of wealth distribution now hold more than three-quarters of the nation's total family wealth. Those falling within the 51st to 90th percentiles owned less than a quarter of it. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent own just 1 percent of the total share.

Putting it into dollars, the CBO notes that the average wealth of the top 10 percent of families was $4 million compared with $36,000 for those in the 26th to 50th percentiles. The wealth of families in the bottom 25 percent was in the red, because of an average of about $13,000 in debt, up from around $1,000 in debt prior to the Great Recession. (CBO defines wealth as a family's assets—including business and home equities, other real estate holdings, financial securities, bank deposits, and pension accounts—minus its debts.)...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/cb0-report-wealth-income-inequality