Thread by @pdacosta

THREAD: "If average black family wealth continues to grow at the same pace it has over the past three decades, it would take black families 228 years to amass the same amount of wealth white families have today." ips-dc.org/report-ever-gr…

"By 2043, the racial wealth divide between White
households and Black and Latino households will stand at over a million dollars." h/t @IPS_DC

@IPS_DC "Over the past three decades, the racial wealth divide between Black and Latino households and White households
has increased from about $280,000 in 1983 to over $500,000 in 2013."

@IPS_DC After "decades of discriminatory housing policies and market practices, coupled with a recession that disproportionately harmed households of color... only 41% of Black households and 45% of Hispanic households own their homes, compared to 71% of White households."

@IPS_DC "As Blacks and Latinos have been slipping further and further behind, the wealthiest Americans have enjoyed tremendous gains.

@IPS_DC "Between 1983 and 2013, the top 20% of the wealthiest households took 99.4% of all wealth gains, with the top 1% taking the lion’s share of those gains (40%). Meanwhile, the bottom 80% of households were left with just 0.6% of total wealth gains."

@IPS_DC "Today, an ultra-wealthy group of 400 people in the top 1% now owns an all-time record $2.34 trillion in wealth. Just as staggering, since 1983, this elite group has seen their wealth increase by an average of 736%, from $700 million to $5.8 billion."

@IPS_DC "This rise in the wealth of the country’s elite is a nearly unfathomable amount, especially when compared to the
Latino and Black population, which saw their respective wealth increase by an average of 69% and 27%, respectively.

@IPS_DC "To put in perspective how extreme wealth inequality has been over the past 30 years, we would need this page to be 3,128 feet long—more than half a mile—in order to show this graph to scale."

@IPS_DC "The wealthiest 100 members of the Forbes list alone own about as much wealth as the entire African-American population, which stands at about 42 million."

@IPS_DC When it comes to the over 55 million people that make up the Latino population, the wealth of the richest 186 members of the Forbes list overshadows this entire group."

@IPS_DC "Overall, the billionaires of the Forbes 400—which includes only two African-Americans and five Latinos—now own
more wealth than the entire Black population and one-third of the Latino population, combined. That’s 400 wealthy
individuals versus more than 60 million people."

@IPS_DC "More than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, many wealth-building policies still continue to heavily
favor households that do not need help building wealth while doing little or nothing for low-wealth households of
color.

@IPS_DC "Today, these policies disproportionally skew towards wealthy—predominately White—households. Although a number of wealth-building policies over the years have favored the wealthy over typical wage earners, the largest and most powerful of these flow through the U.S. tax code.

@IPS_DC "These federal tax programs overwhelmingly favor building the wealth of those at the top, contributing to the extreme rise in overall wealth inequality over the past several decades."

@IPS_DC "Today the typical millionaire receives about $145,000 in public tax benefits to grow their wealth, while working families get a grand total of $174 on average."