NBC News: Labor share of business income falls to historic lows as corporate profits explode

American workers are getting the smallest slice of the pie on record

 

Rob Wile

 

Since 2000, the value of the S&P 500 stock index has gained about 600%. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted worker earnings have climbed just 12.5%. 

 

It is now the least rewarding time to be a worker in the U.S. economy since the government started keeping track.

The share of economic growth captured by labor in the form of compensation like wages fell to a record low last quarter, hitting 52.8%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which began recording the statistic in 1947.

In other words, even as the economy continues to grow, worker pay comprises an ever smaller slice of the pie.

The data comes as stock prices continue to hover near all-time highs, while wage growth is barely keeping up with inflation.

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that wage growth slowed to its lowest rate in five years in August and remains below the broader pace of price growth.

It’s the latest data point reflecting a decades-long stagnation in returns to labor, while corporate profits have exploded.

Since approximately the start of this century, the S&P 500 stock index has gained about 600%. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted worker earnings have climbed just 12.5%.

Wages vs. inflation

Since April, the prices consumers pay are rising faster than wages.

As of April 2026, inflation has outpaced wages, spiking in May at 4.2% before falling to 3.3% in July. Wages have continued a downward trend since March 2025 when the annual change was 4.2%, falling to 3.1% in August 2026.

What’s driving it all?

Economists aren’t really certain about the exact cause, but a confluence of factors appears to be at work, according to Mike Konczal, vice president of policy and research at the Economic Security Project and a former White House chief economist in the Biden administration.

The start of the century coincided with what is known as the “China Shock,” as Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization massively accelerated globalization and offshoring.

The shock chipped away at the number of traditional blue-collar workers in the U.S., and it reduced the bargaining power of those who remained.

Meanwhile, technological advances have allowed the typical worker to generate larger volumes of more valuable services.

But those gains are being captured as company profits, not as wage growth.

The trend appeared to reverse, or at least stabilize, for a brief period during the post-pandemic economic reopening. But exactly why that happened is still not entirely clear.

The decline resumed after President Donald Trump returned to office in 2025.

Konczal said some economists believe corporations have sought to increase their profit margins at the expense of higher wages for workers in order compensate for the economic uncertainty that Trump’s tariff policies have created.

Regardless of the specific reasons behind the renewed drop in gains for labor, the decline has implications for all of society, Konczal said.

It stands to increase wealth inequality by putting more resources in the hands of capital owners — namely stock market investors — while the returns to workers stagnate.

It also has fiscal implications: Konczal said efforts to increase taxes on wealth or corporate profits have proved politically untenable so far, compared with the current arrangement of taxing earned income and wages instead.

“The economy can start to become unequal in a way that it’s not just the CEO who makes more, but people who own shares do, and that wealth is very, very unequal,” he said.

 

 

Labor's share of business income made another new low in 1Q2026, the fourth consecutive quarterly decline

 Meanwhile Applesauce Brains II:

Trump says ‘everybody’s profiting’ from recent market rallies — but it’s mostly the 1% 

 ... The bottom 50% of households collectively hold just 1% of that stock and mutual fund wealth.

 ... According to a Gallup Poll often cited by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, 38% of American households have no exposure to equities at all.

... As of the first quarter of 2026, the top 1% owned half of corporate equities and mutual fund shares, or about $27.64 trillion, according to the most recent Federal Reserve data, while the top 10% of Americans hold more than 87%.

Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of households collectively held just 1% — or $590 billion — of that stock and mutual fund wealth.

“Half of Americans effectively own no stocks,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s. And “to be in the top 1%, you need to make over $750,000 annually.” ...

 

 

US economic growth peaked during the Reagan administration because America is a debt-based economy and we turned our backs on the formula during it

 The trend for the growth of the total universe of US debt, TCMDO or total credit market debt outstanding, rolled over after 1985, one year after GDP did.

TCMDO is the real money, almost $108 trillion at the end of 2025. In 1985 it was $9 trillion.

M2 was merely $22 trillion at the end of 2025. 

TCMDO is the sum total of debt expansion throughout the sectors of the economy.

Historically, most people have experienced it this way.

You get a full time job, which itself was created by a business selling debt in the form of stocks and bonds in order to expand its operations and future profits, and you go buy a house, putting down $100k on a $500k property. The bank loans you the $400k through fractional reserve lending on a small portion of its reserves but secured by the house. That new money is created out of thin air but is actually represented by the "guaranteed" future income stream of your job for 30 years, because you're a smart, reliable guy who never misses a day of work. TCMDO expands, and expands some more each time this happens.

When the conditions disappear for full time job creation, the process slows down. You can see the decline in the growth of the economy in the decline of the growth of the debt. Yes, everything is still growing, but not as vigorously.

Full time as a percent of population peaked 26 years ago, in 2000, at 53.55%, but retested the 1975 low of 46.74% in 2010 and 2011 at 46.97%, back-to-back years in the Late Great Recession.

Housing strength persisted in the immediate post-Reagan period on the illusory basis of windfalls from massive ordinary income tax cuts combined with the demographic peaking of the 1957 Baby Boom turning 40 in 1997 driving demand, but the hollowing out of the economy had already begun with the move of 20,000 manufacturers abroad after the 1986 tax reform.

Early warning signs began flashing already during the Clinton era.

Clinton immediately raised taxes in 1993 after he promised not to raise them in 1992, began a long series of cuts to federal government employment, and gutted the US Navy.

Americans were already struggling at the time and ominously tapped housing equity to sustain their middle class standard of living. Owners' Equity in Real Estate averaged 70% 1982-1986 inclusive, but plunged ten points within a decade to 60% 1996-1999 inclusive.

Homes had become piggy banks, preparing the way for 1997, the year Clinton and the Republicans went further still and turned homes into mere commodities, which in turn prepared the way for the housing catastrophe of 2008. From 1997 a flood of 70,000 more manufacturers began moving out as globalization kicked into high gear and China gained admission to the WTO in 2001.

Almost no one today wants to say out loud how unpatriotic this whole business was. 

Reagan tried to convince us that we know best what to do with our own money, and we promptly turned around and staked our fortunes on foreign investment, not domestic.

Libertarianism is a lie.  

Today you will be hard-pressed to identify a major manufacturing concern with 100% of its operations in the US. Tesla is a standout (heavily subsidized by the federal government!), but other than that most of the businesses which remain patriotically committed to the American idea are pretty small beer compared with how it used to be. 

The formerly domestic debt expansion was exported abroad, creating middle classes where none existed before, especially in East Asia, and doing so cost businesses A LOT less, the key attraction for them.

As a result, enormous profits accrued to the owners of capital while wage earners here struggled to maintain the American dream. Wealth inequality soared, and now our children are 40 before they buy their first home.   

TCMDO grew at a compound annual rate of 8.355% 1945-1985, but at only 6.398% 1985-2025. The change from optimism to pessimism can be traced in the trend lines.

Continued growth of TCMDO at the former rate but after 1985 would have yielded TCMDO at the end of 2025 of $223 trillion, or 106% more "money" than we actually have.

$115 trillion is "missing", or at least something like that. We will never know for sure, but some of us can still imagine because we watched the great betrayal actually happen.

This is why I say socialism is the future, not because I want it or because I think it will work.

People are going to figure this out eventually, get angry, and do the wrong thing, just like we did during the Reagan administration. 

 

 

I stopped caring about this particular economic measure when I realized that it obscures the fact that the top 20% in this country receive 60% of the income it displays

Frankly, most of the economic charts produced by the government do this kind of thing.

Most of the time the rich use this data to tell you how well things are going, when what they really mean is how well it's going for them.

It's an aggregate measure, so that the vast sums earned by the rich distort higher what's actually happening to the majority. 

In the as-reported numbers at the time, everything actually went sideways for a time during the Great Recession and personal income actually fell, except that even that decline disappeared as the revisions to the data came in. The rich still made money in the Great Recession, enough to lift this aggregate measure ever higher right through the recession even as banks failed by the hundreds and millions lost their jobs and homes.

But the rich use this particular data set right now to tell you things like "you don't know how to shop" and "groceries have never been cheaper", you ignoramus.

They controlled roughly 60% of all income from 2020 to mid-2025, and the top 20% by wealth held nearly 72% of total household wealth as of Q4 2025. 

The top 20% received roughly $14 trillion of the $23 trillion in this chart in March 2026, leaving the remaining $9 trillion, 40%, to be split by the 80%, the rest of us, however we must.

Rising prices of anything will naturally impact the 20% far less than the 80%.

It's another "let them eat cake" moment.

 

 

Dirty Rotten CEOs in the news

CEO pay soars 20 times faster than workers... 

 

... The average CEO received $8.4m in total compensation in 2025 compared to $7.6m in 2024. ...

 

For 384 CEOs in the S&P 500 where CEO compensation data was available, pay increased by 25% from 2024 to 2025, while average hourly earnings for workers at private companies increased 1.3% in the same period. ... 

How many millions do you need in Jan 2026 to be a Jan 1913 millionaire?

 33.19

AI estimates between 208-225k Americans had net worth of $30 million or more in 2025. 

The wealth inequality of today's K-shaped economy goes back to the Reagan Revolution

Wealth inequality and the ‘K-shaped’ economy are more striking than ever, data shows

 

They take vacations and buy luxury goods. You struggle to pay for food, shelter, and transportation.

 

K is not OK.

 

... A key measure of wealth concentration called the Gini coefficient sits at 60-year highs, according to a report from U.S. Bank published earlier this month. ... The net worth of America’s top 1% hit a record share of nearly 32% in the third quarter of 2025, the Federal Reserve reported. By comparison, the bottom 50% cumulatively held 2.5% of overall net wealth.

 

The portion of U.S. GDP heading to workers in the form of compensation tumbled to its lowest level in its more than 75-year history, per data tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That means the average nonfarm business worker is seeing an increasingly small slice of an economy that has largely boomed over the last 15 years. ...

 

Total relative “outlays” — a broad measure of spending and nonmortgage payments — by U.S. consumers in the top 20% hit multidecade highs last year, a data analysis conducted by Moody’s Analytics found. The other 80% tumbled to new lows, the data shows. ...

 

While the “K-shape” term became popularized as an explanation for the uneven economic recovery seen during the pandemic, economists say the origins of this breakaway can be traced back decades earlier.

This type of diverging economy stems from the economic reorganization seen during the Reagan administration, according to Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at tax firm RSM. About two decades later, the structural break that created the K-shaped economy, as it’s now understood, was more clearly observed in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of the late 2000s, he said.

That was in part due to the loss of wealth tied to the historic housing market crash, Brusuelas said. On top of that, he said the jump in joblessness limited earnings potential for those without steady employment in their prime working years.

The Great Recession “created the conditions for the winner-take-all economy that emerged in its aftermath,” said Brusuelas, who first heard the K-shape term around 2008. “If you live, work and inhabit certain portions of the economy, you might as well live on the dark side of the moon compared to what goes on down-market.” ...

To make meaningful inroads, the U.S. would instead need to focus on tax reform and expanding social safety nets, according to RSM’s Brusuelas. ...

Adam Tooze: Central bankers' hands were forced in 2010, the poor dears, they aren't the lords of easy money, no, they're its slaves, just like us

 Here, for The New York Times:

If you are worried about wealth inequality in the United States, then the solution is not to tighten monetary policy but to make structural changes to the country’s financial system, starting with the undergrowth of shadow banking. Serious taxation of wealth and capital gains would also push in the right direction.

It would no doubt help if onetime central bankers, rather than cycling in and out of private finance, spoke out seriously in favor of reform. They would be doing the public a service if they spelled out the way that their hands were forced by the current incestuous intertwining of public debt markets with hedge funds and the like. Ultimately, however, it is politics that must grasp the nettle of change.

In the current dispensation, it may be flattering for central bankers to be cast as maestros, but in practice they are less the lords of easy money than its functionaries.     

 

 

Central bankers cycle in and out of private finance raking in millions, Adam.

 

If anyone were serious about restructuring the country's financial system, the place to start would be by restoring the key missing feature of capitalism without which it doesn't really exist. It's called bankruptcy. 

In January 2021 just 47.4% of the civilian population had full-time jobs, compared with 2020's average of 47.3%

Biden reportedly said in response to the employment situation summary today:

"At that rate it's going to take ten years to get back to full employment. That's not hyperbole that's a fact."

The fact is employment has never recovered to pre-Great Recession levels, and Biden is as little likely to fix that as were Obama and Trump.

The Reagan era tax reforms hollowed out the labor economy. 

Before Reagan, high marginal tax rates on ordinary income steered that income into capital investment, gains from which received preferential tax treatment if held long enough. The investment grew the economy, providing good jobs for Americans and tax revenues for government at all levels. The arrangement distrusted rich people to do the right thing with their money, but rewarded them if they did.

Reagan libertarianism changed all that.

We were sold the idea that lower taxes on high ordinary incomes would still result in capital investment because we could trust people to do the right thing with their own money.

Guess what? Libertarian trust of human nature turned out to be as false as liberal trust of human nature. 

Under the influence of libertarian free trade dogma and growing globalization, that investment went abroad where there was far cheaper labor, lower taxes and less regulation. Profits soared for the few, bringing the number of billionaires from less than fifty in the 1980s to nearly 800 today. Meanwhile the good jobs gradually disappeared and income inequality soared.

Ordinary people today cannot afford cars, educations, health care, and houses as a result.

Add in cheap labor competition from immigration at a clip of 1 million a year and you can understand how Trump was so popular, however incompetent and narcissistic he was.

Trump may be gone, but the people remain screwed by these problems and by the time serving politicians and 2.8 million federal bureaucrats working for pensions who stand in the way.

Returning to the status quo ante might fix it, but it would take a generation to start feeling it. And who among us has the vision and the cojones to pull it off?

Certainly not the women and snowflakes who cry crocodile tears of fear on the House floor. Certainly not the sailors on board the Chafee who are in a panic because the cooks are infected with COVID.

The country is rotting from the inside out. All it will take to bring it down is . . . a series of unfortunate events.

Berman and Milanovic show increased "intersection between the top decile of capital-income recipients and labor-income earners" since Reagan 1986 tax reform has led to higher income inequality

Regrettably the study does not mention another factor, how free-trade, particularly with China and East Asia generally, helped drive wages in the US at the bottom ever lower. The Reagan era produced a perfect storm of screwed for the bottom half in America.

Here:

Where does homoploutia come from? The data do not allow us to determine that with certainty, but they allow to investigate what is consistent with individual hypotheses. There is strong evidence that increased wage-stretching that began around 1980 is associated with the rising homoploutia (the other alternatives that do not perform as well are rising inequality of capital incomes and rising capital share).

The link between higher inequality of labor incomes and homoploutia might have occurred in two ways. The first is that many high-earning individuals saved a large share of their wages, invested it, and after some years began receiving large capital incomes. The second is that many capital-rich people decided, perhaps because of changed social norms, or because top jobs became more lucrative as marginal tax rates were reduced, not to treat university education as “luxury consumption” but rather to use it to secure good jobs. It could be, of course, that both mechanisms were at work. 

LOL, what a shock: Chicom state capitalism has produced the most severe income inequality in the world, enriching The Party

Story.

According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, China has the world’s highest Gini coefficient, a measurement of inequality. The institute found the gap stemmed from structural problems with China’s political system. State capitalism has been effective in fueling growth in the economy, but worsened inequality because of its inefficient distribution. The downside of China’s state capitalism has been exposed. 

LOL: Rat-infested cities tend to be Democrat cities

Trump’s Attack on Baltimore Doesn’t Go Far Enough:

Take a look at the eight other cities that beat Baltimore on Orkin’s rattiest cities list. What do they all have in common? We’ll, let’s see:

Chicago hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1931. Philadelphia last saw a Republican mayor in 1952, Detroit in 1962. San Francisco has been Democrat-controlled since 1964. Washington, D.C., has never had a Republican mayor.

In Los Angeles, Democrats have run the city in all but eight of the past 58 years, in New York, it’s eight in the past 74 (not counting John Lindsay, who switched parties while in office). Cleveland’s been run by Democrats in all but 16 of the past 78 years.

Indeed, if you want to see what liberal Democratic policies tend to produce, go to any one of those cities, or other Democratic strongholds. Democrats promise to help the poor and downtrodden, grow the middle class, make life more fair. But their policies consistently produce the opposite.

These cities are rife with crime. Baltimore ranks No. 1 for robberies and No. 2 for murders. Many of the other rat-infested cities also rank high for violent crimes. Their infrastructure is crumbling. The middle class has largely abandoned them. 

And far from tackling inequality, Democrats have made it worse. Washington, San Francisco and New York are all in the top 10 for biggest income inequality levels, according to the Brookings Institution. Other Democrat cities — Providence, Miami, Boston, New Orleans — are also on the list.

Washington, San Francisco, New York, Detroit, and Cleveland are also among the 10 worst-run cities, according to WalletHub. Three other Democratic strongholds — Oakland, Flint, Hartford — make WalletHub’s worst-run list.

 

Ann Coulter says she agrees with AOC: Raise taxes on the rich

Ann just wants to punish the Koch Brothers in the process, but there's a better reason to agree.

Good government acts like a curb on a street, steering behavior. That's what taxing the rich used to be all about.

How so?

Once enacted in 1916, high taxation of ordinary income didn't result in high revenues for government. That's why the income tax was extended to almost all earners instead of just the rich when it became clear within a few years that government wouldn't have enough money to play in the international sandbox without more dough. For their part the rich won long term tax concessions through diverting derivation of income from capitalist enterprises, the latter benefiting not just themselves as owners but also individuals with jobs, the country with productivity, and the government with additional multiple streams of revenue. It was an intricate but effective way of benefiting all concerned. 

The mistake with the Reagan Revolution was that it misunderstood human nature. It thought lots of new untaxed ordinary income would end up getting invested just the same way, and turn America into something never before seen. But the money didn't get invested the same way. It fled abroad where the cost of doing business was cheaper. It helped create middle classes wherever it went, but ours withered on the vine. Meanwhile the number of US billionaires mushroomed, the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay went ballistic, and general income inequality increased dramatically. Real incomes for most people have barely moved up since the 1970s.

And now here we are with an America never before seen indeed, where libertarian advocates of this destructive system tell us with a straight face that this is patriotism.

Unfortunately, none of this is in the pea brain of AOC, let alone in Ann Coulter's, Kevin McCarthy's or Donald Trump's.  

Oliver Bullough for The Grauniad blames all the wealth inequality today on an invention of a Jewish banker

Siegmund George Warburg, here, whose invention destroyed the Bretton Woods system.

Except Bullough never mentions he's the descendant of a long line of Jewish bankers who originated in Venice:

One banker in particular was not prepared to tolerate this: Siegmund Warburg. Warburg was an outsider in the cosy world of the City. For one thing, he was German. For another, he hadn’t given up on the idea that a City banker’s job was to hustle for business. In 1962, Warburg learned from a friend at the World Bank that some $3bn was circulating outside the US – sloshing around and ready to be put to use. Warburg had been a banker in Germany in the 1920s and remembered arranging bond deals in foreign currencies. Why couldn’t his bankers do something similar again?

Frank Rich: The sole upside of the 2008 crash is that it exposed the kleptocratic Establishment of both parties

The chief kleptocrat, of course, was Bill Clinton, but Franky doesn't mention that, nor that his hero Barack Obama, who in the worst of economic times managed to come in third for increasing income inequality, is hard at work in retirement trying to catch up with him. Former President Carter, meanwhile, is building and restoring over 30 homes in Indiana for his 2018 work project. 

Still, it's a worthwhile read, if your indignation has been flagging of late.

In 2008, America Stopped Believing in the American Dream

You first, English jerk

Billionaire Richard Branson: America should give out free cash to fix income inequality

American business abandoned America starting in 2000, investing gargantuan sums abroad instead of here at home

This is why we have so much income inequality in 2017.

American business increased investment levels abroad by 282% since the year 2000, chasing cheaper labor and resources and jurisdictions with few regulations (environmental, safety, wage and insurance laws).

But domestically investment is down, almost 18%. This is why incomes are stagnant, GDP is low, and good jobs are scarce in the United States.

Don't let the Republicans do this to us again.

How to tax the rich and only the rich as originally intended in 1913, and solve a lot of problems

In 1913 when the average Joe made about $800 a year, the first income tax under the 16th Amendment didn't worry him because he didn't pay it and probably thought he never would. The personal exemption for a married couple in the original tax code was $4,000.

Today that $4,000 personal exemption adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index amounts to about $100,000.

Even in 2016 that kind of income is made by fewer than 10% of individual wage earners. Under the original income tax of 1913, 90% today wouldn't have to worry about paying the dreaded income tax either.

Is there a way to return to this golden age of taxation?

I'm here to tell you that I think so, and I say that as a conservative. We could easily simplify the tax code by returning to the status quo which prevailed before the First World War, pay all the bills, abolish Social Security and Medicare taxes, the corporate income tax and all the other little irritating taxes and reduce income inequality in the process. We'd also save a lot of time and money wasted in complying with the tax code's myriad baroque features.

Here's the math.

In 2016 according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis personal income in the United States was $15.9287 trillion.

Social Security's Office of the Chief Actuary tells us that in 2016 there were 163.5 million individual wage earners. If you exempt the first $100,000 of everybody's individual wage income in 2016, including from the rich, you're talking about $6.213 trillion of individual wage income which would be tax-free.

That leaves $9.7157 trillion of personal income left in 2016 to tax, to pay all the bills.

According to The Tax Policy Center, the bills were the total estimated federal outlays of $3.9513 trillion in 2016.

So, the tax is 40.67% (9.7157 X .4067 = 3.9513) on all personal income in excess of $100,000 a year, no itemized deductions, no credits of any kind (this is where they all came from in the first place, because the rich pissed, moaned and complained and bribed the politicians to carve out privileges for them to escape paying).

The rich, all 14.9 million of them, will still have $7.2544 trillion to play with ($1.49 trillion from their first $100K tax-free, just like everybody else, and $5.7644 trillion left over after taxes from the income in excess of $100K).

The rest of us, 148.6 million, won't pay any federal income tax, Social Security or Medicare tax, gasoline tax, or any other kind of federal tax on our $4.723 trillion. The only taxes we'll have to pay will be State and Local Income Taxes, property taxes, sales taxes and the like. Of course rich people will have to pay those too, but that's a problem for all of us and for a different level of politics.

I summarize:

$15.9287 trillion personal income 2016 (BEA)

-  3.9513 trillion federal taxes, all from those making $100,000+ per year @40.67%

-  7.2544 trillion left over for the 14.9 million making $100,000+ per year (top 10%)

-  4.7230 trillion left over for the 148.6 million making less than $100,000 per year (bottom 90%)

___________________________________________________________________

0

And the budget balances.   

Income inequality has increased really for just one reason: Growth of owner occupied housing is in decline

Homeownership is the ticket to the middle class, and fewer and fewer tickets are being issued:

Robert Shiller blames housing bubbles on get rich quick flipper narratives, still completely misses the tax angle

Here, in The New York Times:

There is still no consensus on why the last housing boom and bust happened. That is troubling, because that violent housing cycle helped to produce the Great Recession and financial crisis of 2007 to 2009. We need to understand it all if we are going to be able to avoid ordeals like that in the future.

Ordinary Americans were suddenly able to make a lot of money by flipping their homes because of the tax law changes of 1997. Capital that was previously locked-up in housing by the rules of the New Deal until 1997 was suddenly unleashed to slosh around in the economy when lawmakers gave homeowners the right to avoid most capital gains on the sale of their homes as long as they lived in them only two years. Until 1997, if you didn't buy a more expensive home after you sold yours, you were exposed to a tax hit, unless you took the option of a once in a lifetime exclusion on the gain. The old arrangement had insured, along with the 30-year mortgage, that housing capital built up over a long period of time, creating forced savings for the middle class which could be safely liquidated in retirement without adversely affecting the housing market.

The Republican and Democrat geniuses who ran our government in 1997 changed all that, and within ten years the dang thing blew up. Yeah, I'm talking about you, Bill Clinton, and you, Newt Gingrich.

Too bad Robert Shiller still doesn't get it.

It would probably be unwise to turn back the tax clock now that the damage has been done, but the reinflation of the housing bubble after the crisis wasn't inevitable. The Fed's unprecedented zero interest rate policy has been responsible for that.

When the next housing crash comes, we'll probably not understand it either.

Meanwhile, the median sales price of homes in the aggregate has never been higher, or more unaffordable, and remains the primary driver of wealth inequality in America.