And the bottom half’s share? About 1.3%.
Although the wealthy own most of the assets, the less well-off hold a disproportionate share of the liabilities. The top 10% have a relatively modest amount of debt ($633 billion for the top 1%, and the rest of the top 10% has $2.8 trillion). Meanwhile, the bottom 50% has $5.6 trillion in liabilities; the group between the top decile and the bottom half has more than $6 trillion in liabilities. In other words, the bottom 90% has total liabilities of almost $12 trillion.
The conclusion here is that the wealthy own most of the assets, while the less wealthy are stuck with most of the liabilities. Construct the cleverest campaign slogan out of this and you just might become the Democratic nominee for president.
Supply-side economics doesn’t make everyone richer: There’s probably something for incumbents and challengers here, and it might also help settle a debate that has preoccupied economic wonks for years. We can now show data for the three decades following the adoption of Reaganomics, aka supply-side economics; that reducing the tax burden on the wealthy would lead to a burst of economic growth that would make everyone richer, and that wealth would trickle down from the top. The new data make it clear that the opposite has happened, and wealth inequality and income inequality have each increased.
This data helps us see that supply-side economics was always about shifting wealth from the low and middle ends of the wealth distribution toward the top. In other words, much of our wealth inequality is by design, the result of public policies. Whether this was done out of good faith or bad is up to you to decide.
The conclusion of all this giant data dump: We shouldn't be surprised if economic inequality plays an ever-more prominent role than it has in past presidential election cycles. We all owe a small debt of gratitude to the researchers are the Fed who pulled this data together and made it just a little easier to understand the full extent of the vast disparities in wealth and income in modern America.
This column was provided by Bloomberg News.