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Income Inequality in the United States

In the United States today, one percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top one percent control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. Millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages, and yet almost all of the new income and wealth being created is going to the top one percent. While the top one percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. 
  Scholars, from the Nobel-Prize-winning Paul Krugman to the widely respected economist James Surowiecki, have been working to analyze these disparities. Americans are not generally aware of the extent of this income inequality. In most developed countries, there is a direct relationship between income inequality and the public's views about the need to address the issue – but not in America, where income inequality is worse but the concern is lower. The most commonly accepted measurement of income inequality, the Gini Index, ranks the United States sixth-worst among 173 nations. 
   Private-equity companies are far more obviously connected to an undue concentration of wealth at the expense of workers and communities than are collateralized-debt obligations, which were at the core of our 2008 Great Recession. Within the one percent, there is a top one percent that consists disproportionately of private-equity and hedge-fund principals.