Wealth Gap Widens as Rich Take More

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

UCS News Service, September 2011

A recent analysis of new Census data revealed that white families are wealthier than minority families and the rich are a lot richer than they were just six years ago.
The Pew Research Center analysis showed decades of minority gains vanishing into thin air in recent years as housing values evaporated and unemployment soared. White families now average a staggering 20 times the net worth of blacks and 18 times that of Hispanics—the biggest gap in 25 years.
But the real dividing line was not white and black but green. Buried in the analysis was that the wealth gap between rich and poor widened across all race and ethnic groups as the share of wealth held by the top 10 percent of U.S. households increased from 49 percent in 2005 to a whopping 56 percent in 2009. 
The recession has affected the very rich, however. A family now needs an income of just $598,435 to make the list of the wealthiest top 10 percent, down from $646,327 in 2005.
Household wealth is the accumulated sum of assets (houses, cars, savings and checking accounts, stocks and mutual funds, retirement accounts, etc.) minus the sum of debt (mortgages, auto loans, credit card debt, etc.). About a quarter of all Hispanic and black households in 2009 had no assets other than a vehicle, compared with just 6 percent of white households.
The median wealth of white U.S. households in 2009 was $113,149, compared with $6,325 for Hispanics and $5,677 for blacks, according to the Pew analysis. In 1995 the booming economy helped push those ratios to low of 7 to 1 for both groups.
“The bursting of the housing market bubble in 2006 and the recession that followed from late 2007 to mid-2009 took a far greater toll on the wealth of minorities than whites,” say report authors Rakesh Kochhar, Richard Fry and Paul Taylor.