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US inequality is getting worse in ways you might not expect
The buzzword of the 2026 U.S. midterm elections may be affordability, but growing anger over inequality is behind the sentiment.
A Pew Research survey released in October 2026 found that roughly 6 in 10 Americans – including 4 in 10 Republicans – believe there’s too much inequality in the U.S. And a growing share from both major political parties state that the economy needs to be fundamentally rebuilt to address this.
This sentiment has, however, been difficult to convert into political results. Public support for California’s proposed wealth tax on billionaires has been waning ahead of the midterms, for example, and in 2025, Republicans passed President Donald Trump’s sweeping legislation that included tax cuts for the wealthy while cutting safety net programs.
I’m an economist who has been studying inequality for about two decades. My research confirms the trend of rising inequality since 1980, driven by the wealthiest pulling away not just from the middle class, but also from the “merely wealthy.” Overall, recent research underscores how policy choices – including taxation and public spending – enabled this 40-year rise in inequality.
Some policies enacted more recently appear to be accelerating this trend. An analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan research organization, concluded that policy changes since the start of 2025 have imposed higher costs on everyone except the top 1%.
Inequality by the numbers
Recent federal data shows that wealth inequality continues to grow. The top 1% saw their share of wealth increase from 31.7% to 32.5% just between the first and second quarters of 2026, a jump of over $8.5 trillion. That caps a steady climb from 30.9% in the last quarter of 2024 – and from 27.4% in 1999.
These recent gains come at the expense of the middle class – the 40% between the bottom half and the top 10% – who hold only 28.8% of all wealth despite being a group that’s 40 times larger than the top 1%. And the middle’s share is shrinking, down from 32.9% in 1999 and 30.2% at the end of 2024, according to the data.
But the ultra-wealthy, those in the top 0.1%, are pulling away even from the rest of the rich, the data shows. This tiny elite owns 15% of all wealth – almost half of all the wealth of the top 1%. Both the top 0.1% and the next 0.9% saw their share of wealth increase, but the top 0.1% captured two-thirds of the gains between the first and second quarters of 2026.
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Even within the highest echelons of wealth concentration, these two groups are on different trajectories.
Crucially, the wealth of the top 0.1% is disproportionately boosted by corporate profits, which are up sharply overall. The top 0.1% reap the most from this growth because their portfolios’ value has soared on the promise of future increased profitability that’s driving up stock prices – especially thanks to the tech and artificial intelligence boom.
How taxes play a role
Since President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in the 1980s, the U.S. tax code has become less and less progressive, often through policy changes supported by both Republicans and Democrats.
The common argument for tax cuts is that they stimulate growth, but a growing body of research – including international studies – doesn’t back that up. A 2025 Brookings report notes that U.S. tax policy has gone through massive changes throughout history without any discernible effect on growth.
Nonetheless, congressional Republicans used their narrow majorities in 2025 to pass Trump’s sweeping policy and tax bill, which included provisions making most of his 2017 tax cuts permanent. Those included the historically low top-income tax rate and the lowest corporate tax rate since 1940.
It’s also important to understand that the top 0.1% have a different tax exposure from the rest of the top 1% because the composition of their wealth is different. They own as much in stocks and mutual funds as the next 0.9%, a group that is nine times larger, and those holdings are where most of their recent gains came from.
Furthermore, roughly three-quarters of the top 0.1%’s wealth portfolio consists of corporate and business ownership, allowing them to benefit from the Trump tax cuts in multiple ways – including lower tax rates and more opportunities to defer or avoid tax liability. Their massive holdings of stock mean that they can borrow against it for cash, usually tax-free, rather than having to sell shares.
By contrast, below that elite, real estate is a much more important component of wealth, while corporate equity is a smaller and smaller share. For the middle class, nearly two-thirds of wealth is held in their homes and retirement savings, while corporate and business ownership accounts for only 15%.
The new drivers of inequality
Much of the inequality debate focuses on the role that taxation has played. But other recent policy changes have shifted different kinds of costs on to low- and middle-income earners, while leaving the wealthy relatively unscathed.
One example is a provision in Trump’s 2025 legislation that allowed federal healthcare subsidies through the Affordable Car Act to lapse. Insurers and analysts expect the number of people signing up for coverage through ACA plans to drop by about 5 million due to higher premiums and face much higher out-of-pocket costs.
The spike in energy costs, including gasoline, diesel and heating oil, is another case in point. They disproportionately affect low- and middle-income consumers but barely dent the budgets of the wealthy – while boosting the profits of companies engaged to the extraction, processing and transportation of oil. This divergence has been especially pronounced since the start of the conflict with Iran in February 2026, which has pushed up the global price of oil.
Then there are tariffs, which are fundamentally a consumption tax on imports. Economists at the New York Federal Reserve have found that these levies have inflicted a heavy hit on many common consumer goods. They estimated that prices for these items, which make up a much larger share of household budgets among the nonwealthy, would have fallen on average by 1% over the year without the tariffs. Instead, they have risen by 2.9%.
This acceleration in the redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the very top, in short, has an array of drivers. But they’re not inexorable forces of history. As economist Thomas Piketty put it in “A Brief History of Equality,” published in 2022: “Inequality is first of all a social, historical, and political construction.”
Markus Schneider, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Denver
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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