Billionaire Bonanza 2017

The Forbes 400, the annual wealth list published today by Forbes Magazine, have a combined wealth of $2.68 trillion. This is greater than the combined wealth of the bottom 64 percent of all U.S. households, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies.

The full report, “Billionaire Bonanza 2017: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us,” draws on the most recent data published by the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finance and the 2017 Forbes 400 list from Forbes.

“If left unchecked, wealth will continue to accumulate into fewer and fewer hands, a trend we’ve been witnessing for decades,” said Josh Hoxie, report co-author. “The time to reverse this trend is past due.”

“We have a billionaire problem in the United States,” said Chuck Collins, the coauthor of the report.  “The concentration of wealth at the top is a troubling trend for a democratic society.”

Authors: 

Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and a co-editor of Inequality.org and the author of Born on Third Base.

Josh Hoxie is director of the Project on Opportunity and Taxation at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-editor of Inequality.org. 

For Media inquiries about the report, Contact Jessicah Pierre: Jessicah@ips-dc.org