Business Insider, CBS News
A person is stunned to find out the richest Americans have a disproportionate share of wealth.
- Inequality in the United States is as bad as its ever been, but people were mostly unaware of the situation, according to a recent segment of CBS This Morning that aired Friday.
- CBS News took a creative approach in a segment that quickly went viral, illustrating how $98 trillion of household wealth is distributed through slices of pie.
- Watch it here.
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Inequality in the United States is the widest its ever been and it continues to worsen, but people are surprised at how bad it is.
CBS This Morning aired a segment on Friday morning that illustrated American inequality - through slices of pie, and it quickly went viral.
The creative approach allowed people to grasp the depth of the problem in a new (and tasty) way with the show's co-host Tony Dokoupil.
The US held around $98 trillion of wealth in the United States in 2018, according to the Brookings Institution. A 2016 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that nine of ten pieces of the economic pie now belong to the wealthiest 20% of US citizens. Four of those 9 would go to the top 1%.
The upper and middle class would own one slice, or 10% of national wealth. The lower and middle class get 0.3% of the pie, and the poorest 20% of Americans don't get any - and they're actually thousands of dollars in debt on average, CBS reported.
People were stunned to see how bad inequality has gotten after visualizing it by carving up the pie, and seeing how the wealthiest 1% had the overwhelming majority of slices.
"It's very sad, its very depressing," Jessica Ortiz told Dokoupil, noting she grew up in a very low-income family. Many of the people interviewed endorsed the idea of taxing the rich.
Calls to tax wealth has proven popular in the 2020 presidential election, and wide swaths of the American public back the idea, Democrats and Republicans alike. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have put forward wealth tax plans near the center of their progressive platforms.
But not everyone supports a wealth tax. Dokoupil interviewed hedge fund investor John Sheffield, who staunchly opposed it.
"That's against sorta the American way," Sheffield said. "It would be a total disaster … And I'd actually like for them to continue to promote it because they won't get elected in that way."