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Wealth is concentrating upwards in this country — we’ve known that for years. But new numbers really drive home just how severely.
According to our new report, Billionaire Bonanza 2017, there’s been a rapid updraft of wealth into the top echelon of multi-billionaires. The wealthiest 400 Americans now have more wealth together than the bottom 64 percent of the population, over 200 million of us.
That’s bad enough. But through the lens of race, these statistics reveal another dimension of the story. Only seven of the 400 wealthiest Americans are black or Latino — the rest are almost entirely white.
It takes barely half of that list to blot out the total wealth of blacks and Latinos alike. The wealthiest 269 billionaires equal the combined wealth of the entire African-American population of 47 million people. For Latinos, it takes just 252 billionaires.
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