What percentage of total wealth in the US is held by the top 1% of households?

• A new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office tracks wealth distribution.
• The report finds that American families in the top 10% held 72% of the country's wealth in 2019.
• Wealth grown has been uneven, with the richest getting richer faster — and the poorest falling behind.

Over the last 30, that is 30 years years, America's richest families have gotten even richer, while everyone else still hasn't recovered from the Great Recession. 

US families in the top 10% of the wealth distribution added about $60 trillion to their wealth from 1989 to 2019, while the bottom half of Americans added just under $1 trillion to their total wealth during the same time.

That's according to a new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which assesses how family wealth has changed from 1989 to 2019. The report, requested by Sen. Bernie Sanders, shows just how uneven wealth distribution is in the US — and how the rich have only gotten richer.

"The increase in wealth over the 30-year period was unevenly distributed and concentrated near the top of the distribution," the report said. "The total wealth held by families in the top 10 percent increased at a faster rate than wealth held by families in the rest of the distribution." 

While Americans at the top have seen their fortunes grow tremendously over the last several decades, families in the middle haven't been able to build wealth as easily as in the past. Research has found that, from 1943 to 1973, it would take the typical American family around 23 years to double their wealth; but, since 1973, it now takes over 100 years. 

Meanwhile, an inequality study analyzing 20 years of wealth data found a similar worldwide disparity in wealth, finding that the top half of the world holds about 98% of the globe's wealth. That comes after a study of 50 years of tax cuts for the wealthy found that the wealth did not "trickle down," but instead worsened inequality.

CBO measures wealth as a family's holdings of a variety of financial assets.  The disparities in the distributions of those assets was only heightened by the Great Recession, with the 25th and 50th percentile of American families still not seeing wealth rebound from pre-recession levels by 2019. At the same time, the 90th percentile saw their wealth not only recover but grow since 2007.

Indeed, in 1989 the families in the top 10% held 63% of wealth. That ballooned: In 2019, they held 72% of wealth. Broken down even more, the top 1% now holds about a third of all wealth — up from a little less than a quarter in 1989.

"The obscene level of income and wealth inequality in America is a profoundly moral issue that we cannot continue to ignore or sweep under the rug," Sanders said in a statement on the report. "A society cannot sustain itself when so few have so much while so many have so little. In the richest country on Earth, the time is long overdue for us to create a government and an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent."

Wealth Distribution

10 percent of the richest people in the United States own almost 70 percent of the country’s total wealth. As of Q1 of 2021, the top 10 percent held 69.8 percent of total U.S. net worth (which is the value of all assets a person holds minus all their liabilities).

The top 1 percent held about half of that wealth – 32.1 percent, while the next 9 percent held approximately another half at 37.7 percent. The bottom 50 percent of U.S. residents only held 2 percent of all of U.S. wealth. As recently as 2011, that number was as low as 0.4 percent, caused by the downswing of the Great Recession.

The coronavirus pandemic did not have the same effect on the wealth of the bottom 50 percent, which kept growing in 2020 and has now returned to pre-financial crisis levels. The pandemic has, however, expanded the wealth of the ultra-rich top 1 percent, which gained almost two percentage points in overall wealth distribution between Q2 of 2020 and Q1 2021.

Looking the development of U.S. wealth distribution since 1989, the rich have in fact gotten richer, with the top 1 percent expanding their wealth share from 24 percent to 32 percent. The next 9 percent has remained more steady at around 37 percent of wealth held, while the 50-90 percentile has been holding less wealth - 28 percent in 2019, down from 35 percent in 1989.

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