Sanders Condemns Obscene Levels of Inequality Documented in New CBO Report

Yet another report, this one from the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO), highlights what many American families already know: The rich keep getting richer, while everyone else keeps struggling to get by.

The CBO report, released Thursday and prepared at the request of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), examines trends in family wealth from 1989 to 2013. 

It found, unsurprisingly, that the distribution of wealth—assets including home equity, other real estate holdings, financial securities, and defined contribution pension accounts—among the nation’s families “was more unequal in 2013 than it had been in 1989.”

Meanwhile, the report reads: “Compared with families in the top half of the distribution, families in the bottom half experienced disproportionately slower growth in wealth between 1989 and 2007, and they had a disproportionately larger decline in wealth after the recession of 2007 to 2009.”

As of 2013, the top 10 percent of families owned a full 76 percent of total family wealth in the U.S., while those in the bottom half of the distribution held just one percent. The average wealth of the top 10 percent was $4 million, while families in the bottom 25 percent were $13,000 in debt on average.

Responding on Twitter and in a statement, Sanders seized on the findings to reiterate several themes of his presidential primary campaign.