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By 2053, median White household wealth is set to reach $137,000.
By 2020, median Black and Latino households stand to lose nearly 18% and 12% of the wealth they held in 2013, respectively, while median White household wealth increases 3%.
By 2020 White households are projected to own 86 times more wealth than Black households and 68 times more wealth than Latino households.
The USA’s overall median wealth decreased nearly 20% from 1983 to 2013 ($78,000 to $64,000—with Black and Latino median wealth going down and White wealth slowly going up.
White households in the middle income quintile—those earning $37,201-61,328 annually—own nearly eight times as much wealth ($86,100) as Black middle-income earners ($11,000) and ten times that of their Latino counterparts ($8,600).
Suggested remedies include:
A tax on high net worth individuals;
Higher death duties;
Close off-shore tax shelters;
Invest in childrens’ savings accounts
Invest in automatic-enrollment retirement accounts
More favourable mortgage interest deduction treatment
Federal jobs guarantees
Holding racial wealth divide audit of government policies.
Absolutely Ian – just like the horse dung in Picadilly projection. The key thing, as you say, is the poor are getting poorer and with increasing moves around the world to have the state pay guaranteed incomes to the poor you can envisage the final triumph of Big Brother in which most people depend totally on the government.
Which shows the problem with extrapolating curves — but we shouldn’t play down the seriousness of the problem.
What it really shows is that inequality (rich people to poor people of *all* colours) in the USA is steadily increasing as more of the money goes to the top 1% and less to the bottom 50%, and this shows up like this since latino and especially black incomes are heavily skewed towards the bottom end — but I suspect you’d get a very similar result if you looked at white people with incomes in the bottom 50% (or whatever number you choose).