ABSTRACT
The 20 richest Americans now own more wealth than the bottom half of the US population. As of 2014, our country had the fourth-highest degree of wealth inequality in the world, trailing only Russia, Ukraine, and Lebanon. American individuals or families, including Bill Gates, the Koch brothers and the Walton siblings, each own approximately one-thousandth of our nation's $86 trillion in total wealth. As inequality grows, America's infrastructure is falling into a state of dangerous disrepair. Extreme inequality, and the tax avoidance that contributes to it, is even worse on a global scale. The inequality horror they have fomented is reaching far beyond the half of America that is in or near poverty, for it now impacts those of us well above the median, those of us in the second highest of four wealth quartiles. The combined net worth of the sixteen thousand richest Americans is approximately the same as the total wealth of 256 million people.
