Engine of Inequality

Chapter 2How Unequal Are We?

For the first time in decades, we are no longer simply concentrating wealth in the hands of a few. We're concentrating and creating the most inclusive economy ever to exist. We are lifting up Americans of every race, color, religion, and creed.

– President Donald J. Trump*

If President Trump is right, then the rest of this book is a waste of time. Why bother to show that post-crisis financial policy has made Americans even more unequal or devise ways to fix it for equality's sake if we aren't unequal?

The answer lies in the data deluge that is to come in this chapter. Normally, loads of numbers are many numbers too many. However, when a president and many of his advisers and supporters insist that America is equal and then some, it is vital to demonstrate that America has been increasingly unequal since 1980, that it was at levels of income and wealth inequality not seen since World War II before COVID hit, that many other nations are more equal than the US, that African Americans were even more unequal in 2019 than before the civil rights era, and that all of these underlying trends skyrocketed to unprecedented inequality when post-crisis financial policy changed the distribution of wealth in the US starting in 2010. It will take some time to count COVID's long-term impact on American economic inequality, but the ravages it wrought on household wages and employment show irrefutably that the pandemic made inequality worse along with pretty much ...