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Income Inequality
The U.S. had the largest “social distance” gap between households at the 90th percentile and households at the 10th percentile in the income distribution. The U.S. had the highest 90th percentile point, meaning its rich were indeed better off than those in other countries, as almost everyone expects. But its poorest, at the 10th percentile, were also lower in real terms than are the poor in all other comparison countries save Italy.8
Wealth Inequality
Over the past four decades, only the very rich, the top 0.1 percent, had realized wealth in the U.S. In 2012, the top 0.1 percent included 160,000 households with total net assets of more than 20 million. At the same time, the middle class, those in the 50th-90th percentiles, had experienced a decline in their wealth share Available data indicated that there was significantly less wealth inequality in Europe than in the United States. No other country analyzed had top wealth shares as high as the U.S.9
Residential Segregation
The magnitude of minority segregation in the new U.S. gateway cities was much greater than in European cities experiencing recent immigrant growth. Segregation often overlaps with many other place-based inequalities – poverty, unemployment, crime and housing quality and overcrowding. These overlapping disadvantages were seemingly much more common in the U.S. than in European countries, where government efforts to promote integration (e.g., social and mixed-income housing) provided a clear contrast to the market-driven solutions preferred in the U.S.10
School Re-segregation
Poor, black and Hispanic children were becoming increasingly isolated from their white, affluent peers in the nation’s public schools, according to federal data showing the number of high-poverty schools serving black and brown students more than doubled between 2001 and 2014. The problem was not just that students were more isolated, according to the GAO, but that minority students who were concentrated in high-poverty schools didn’t have the same access to opportunities as students im other schools.11
Not only did such inequalities fail to articulate a better time, but they were clearly affecting people's prospects for the future:
Health
The U.S. population was not just sicker, on average, than the European population, but also had a higher level of health inequality than the European population (when data from the U.S. Current Population Survey and the European Union Survey of Income and Living Conditions are compared).12
Education
The income achievement gap in the United States was quite large relative to th 19 other Organization forEconomic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries examined.” Countries with higher levels of poverty, inequality, and economic segregation (among schools) tended to have larger income achievement gaps.13
Economic Mobility
When compared to 24 middle-income and high-income countries, the U.S. ranked 16th in the amount of intergenerational earning mobility. The relatively low level of mobility in the U.S. may have arisen in part because low-income children in the U.S. tended to have less stable and lower-income families, less secure families, and parents who had less time to devote to their children.14
Make no mistake, most of these results were due to the purposeful hollowing out of the American middle class, itself a consequence of intentional design:
Corporate Profits
Corporate profits in the United States increased slightly by 0.6 percent or $8.1 billion to $1388.5 billion in the first three months of 2016,
recovering from a sharp fall of 8.4 percent or $127.4 billion in the previous quarter. Profits in