Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Income Gap Widens As Top 400 Get Richer

By Cornelius Nunev


The income gap between the rich elite and the diminishing class is wider than it was a year ago. According to Forbes, most of the 400 richest people in the nation saw their net worth boost since this time in 2011.

Making more money

About 12.5 percent of the economic climate is made up by the 400 wealthiest citizens in our country, according to NBC News. These 400 individuals, according to Forbes, saw a $1.7 trillion increase in total net worth, or a 13 percent increase, during the last year.

The average net worth per person in the 400 is higher than it has ever been at $4.2 billion.

Stock growth and a rebounding real estate industry made it so 261 of the 400 reported their income increasing for a year.

Rich not anything brand new

The top five from 2011 did not change to be Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, Charles and Koch (tied for fourth) and Christie Walton. There were the anticipated names.

The worth of Gates increased $7 billion to $66 billion. The chairman of Microsoft has been at the top of the list for the last 19 years. There was an $8 billion increase seen by Larry Ellison of Oracle Group in spite of the fact that Warren Buffett only saw his worth rise by $7 billion.

Notable exception

A notable exception to the trend of increasing net worth was social network mogul Mark Zuckerberg, who lost nearly half of his net worth after his cash cow Facebook went public. This year, he is scraping by on $9.4 billion.

Larger gap

The Economic Policy Institute did a study last week that discovered that there have been huge increases to more than double the gap between the wealthy and typical earner. In 1961, the prosperous only made 125 percent more in the top one percent of earners. That number increased to making 288 percent more in 2010.

The income of most Americans has dropped in recent decades, according to the study. However, as we have seen, the worth of the wealthy elite continues to climb.

While the trend has been active for decades, the Economic Policy Institute report noted that the gap has widened at a more rapid pace since the Great Recession.




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