Marty Levine
November 7, 2025
When I posted “If You Don’t Think Wealth Inequality is a Problem” a few days ago, I wondered if that should be the last time I should focus on this subject. Haven’t I written about it enough?
But here’s the answer that came roaring back at me: Not when we have a national government that is hell bent on making the problem of wealth inequality worse in this country. Not when we supposedly have progressive politicians who are afraid to enact policies that can slow, stop, or reverse our slide to an irreversible divide, a divide that will damn the future to one in which a small sliver of our population has great wealth and the rest scrape by with no chance of improvement for the masses.
And not when we are witnessing the beginning an era of trillionaires.
There is no shortage of current information warning us about the treat we face domestically and internationally from the growing concentration of wealth in a very small sliver of our population. Just days ago, OXFAM America released “Unequal – The Rise of a New American Oligarchy and the Agenda We Need,” which documents how wealth inequality has worsened between 1989 and 2022 and points us to the policies that have allowed this to occur. In telling us why it got so bad, it is telling us what we need to change if we desire to create an equitable future for our nation.
Between 1989 and 2022, a household at the 99th percentile (the cutoff for the top 1%) gained over $8.35 million, while the median U.S. household gained less than $83,000, and a household at the 20th percentile, less than $8,500 The accumulation at the top has been especially relentless—a household that would just qualify for the top 0.1% gained $39.5 million between 1989 and 2022 while in 2025, the share of total assets owned by the top 0.1% hit its highest on record (12.6% of total assets) since the Federal Reserve began publishing data in 1989.
- In the past year, the 10 richest U.S. billionaires gained nearly $700 billion dollars ($698 billion).
- The wealthiest 0.1% in the U.S. own 12.6% of assets and 24% of the stock market. The bottom half of the U.S. owns just 1.1% of the stock market.
- Over 40% of the U.S. population—including 48.9% of children—is considered poor or low income.
- Black and Hispanic/Latin households hold 5.8% of U.S. wealth but make up an estimated one-third of the population.
- Between 1989 and 2022, a U.S. household at the 99th percentile (the cutoff for the top 1%) gained 101 times more wealth than the median household and 987 times more wealth than a household at the 20th percentile.
- During that same period, the average male-headed household gained four times the wealth of the average female-headed household and the wealth of the average White household increased 7.2 times more than the average Black household and 6.7 times more than average Hispanic/Latin household.
- Looking at the 10 largest economies in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the U.S. has the highest rate of relative poverty, the second-highest rate of child poverty and infant mortality, and the second-lowest life expectancy.
- Within that same group of peer countries, the U.S. is second-to-last in using its tax and transfer system to reduce inequality, second-to-last in public spending for families with children, seventh out of 10 in public social spending overall, and number one for working hours needed to exit poverty.
- The recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) will reduce the tax bill of the highest-earning 0.1% by an estimated $311,000 in 2027, while the lowest-income households—those making less than $15,000 annually—are expected to face tax increases.
- A modest wealth tax on multimillionaires and billionaires could raise an estimated $414 billion to invest in social programs and fighting poverty.
The human toll is also very clear. We just need to look to how quickly a pause in SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits that began on November 1 has changed the lives of 42 million people for the worse. In a country where more than one-third of the population cannot meet an emergency expense requiring $400, a pause in SNAP benefits, according to Kate Bauer is an associate professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Easily becomes an immediate catastrophe.
Low-income families are constantly juggling their bills, because so many jobs don’t pay enough for people to keep up. A loss of $335 of SNAP benefits means that money from other places now has to pay for food. It means that some families may not be able to pay their rent, that their electricity gets turned off or that they can’t repair the car that they depend on to get to work. This pause will have long-term consequences for many families.
The SNAP program is well known to provide massive economic benefits to communities…The loss of this revenue has ripple effects for everyone, SNAP-user or not. Smaller food retailers may not be able to survive this loss of revenue for very long.
The 42 million people, most of whom are children, seniors, or disabled individuals, are real lives impacted by the dry, “wonky” data describing wealth inequality in our nation.
This picture can be recreated with stories of people unable to meet the soaring cost of housing, or pay their medical bills, or find affordable child care. We live in a wealthy country, as described by US Senator Elizabeth Warren in her introduction to the OXFAM study, that has chosen to allow a few to horde the wealth and doom most of its people to lives of economic struggle and worry.
After World War II, we built an economy where workers shared in the bounty they helped create. Productivity rose and so did wages—for everyone. We invested in our people through public education, infrastructure, and policies that gave families a fighting chance. We built a middle class that was the envy of the world.
Then we changed course. A handful of people at the top decided that minimum wage workers didn’t deserve raises. We stopped investing in public universities. We let corporations offshore good jobs while Wall Street got richer. We watched the wealthiest among us accumulate unimaginable fortunes while paying virtually nothing in taxes, even as every teacher, firefighter, and janitor paid their fair share.
The result is an economy that works great for those at the very top and leaves everyone else hanging on by their fingernails. This didn’t happen by accident. It happened through deliberate policy choices—choices we can unmake.
OXFAM’s policy agenda, one that YOU can put yourself behind, is clear.
REBALANCING POWER: Rebalancing power means backing people, and breaking up concentrated power in the economy, including through antitrust policy and enhancing U.S. democracy.
UNRIGGING THE TAX CODE: The U.S. tax code can do far more to level the playing field and help ordinary people. It can tackle historic concentrations of wealth, curb excess corporate power, and raise hundreds of billions of dollars to invest in social programs and fight poverty. Policymakers ought to raise taxes on the very wealthiest taxpayers and on large, profitable corporations, as well as embrace corporate tax transparency and global cooperation.
REIMAGINING THE SOCIAL SAFETY NET: This means rejecting harmful safety net cuts that will make a punitive system worse, embracing a much more robust vision of a social protection system, and investing in high-quality, universal public services and options that can reduce inequality.
SUPPORTING WORKERS’ RIGHTS: Policymakers ought to strengthen workers’ rights to form unions and collectively bargain, raise the minimum wage, eliminate exclusions from federal labor protections, guarantee access to paid leave, and support worker ownership.
The danger in ignoring what is right in front of our face is the danger that we may reach a point where the balance has shifted so far that the entire economy can crash. Here’s how Bloomberg News described the threat from structural inequality:
The US economy is becoming a Jenga tower, one economist told Bloomberg, increasingly fueled by the profligate spending of the rich while a growing number of people must choose between car payments and dinner. This dichotomy isn’t new, but recent months are witnessing an even starker divide, one that some experts say makes the economy more susceptible to recession.
The data are sobering: The richest 10% of households are fueling almost half of total US spending, thanks in part to the aforementioned stock market frenzy. Meanwhile, lower-income and middle-class families are pulling back in the face of tight budgets, higher costs of living and a grim, rising tide of mass firings.
Preventing disaster and creating an equitable society is a big lift in a political moment in which we face a government that favors the rich and despises the rest of us. But, as Tuesday’s election results indicated, we have a chance if we do not shy away from the need to enact these reforms and redistribute our wealth. We can reverse this slide and ease the pain if we are willing to take direct action. In his victory speech, NYC Mayor Elect Zohran Mamdani gave us a prescription that can be applied across our country.
We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed.
if tonight teaches us anything, it is that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution, and we have paid a mighty price.
This is about not just hope for a better future but a commitment to work for real changes that will make real differences locally and nationally.
It’s a challenge to each of us to go beyond marching on the next No Kings Day to working for candidates who can make a difference. You have between now and November 3, 2026, to become part of the solution.
