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wealth inequality
'100% Completely Unsustainable': Billionaire Wealth Manager Issues New Warning About US Inequality
"Nearly 50% of all consumer spending now comes from the top 10% of earners. The bottom 80%? Their share keeps falling."
Mar 16, 2026
Wealth inequality in the US has grown unsustainably large, according to one billionaire wealth manager.
In a Monday social media post, Peter Mallouk, the CEO of wealth management firm Creative Planning, shared a graph from the Financial Times showing that the top 10% of earners in the US now account for nearly half of all consumer spending.
"This is 100% completely unsustainable as a society," Mallouk commented. "Nearly 50% of all consumer spending now comes from the top 10% of earners. The bottom 80%? Their share keeps falling."
Mallouk added that this disparity is "why the economy can look strong in the data while millions of people feel like they're falling behind."
Mallouk's observations about the highest earners accounting for a disproportionate share of consumer spending are in line with what economists have been describing as a "K-shaped" economy in which wealth continues growing for the very wealthiest while the vast majority of the population gets left behind.
A February report from TD Economics economist Ksenia Bushmeneva noted that "the economic divide between America’s households at the top of the income spectrum and everyone else continued to widen last year," as "upper-income households benefited from the still-robust wage growth, strong gains in equity markets, and better access to consumer credit."
Bushmeneva also projected that this divide would only grow in the coming year given that the tax cuts passed by Republicans in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025 are expected to provide outsized benefits to the wealthiest Americans, even as "a reduction in funding to various government programs" such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program "will weigh on low-income households."
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, told Axios in a January interview that the data on US consumer spending patterns shows that "the economy is narrowly perched on the backs of the well-to-do," which he noted leaves it in a vulnerable position should the ultrawealthy pull back on their spending at any time.
Zandi's view of the instability of such an economy was echoed in a February column by Carol Ryan of The Wall Street Journal, who warned about the dangers of relying on the wealthiest to drive economic growth.
Given that the wealth of these Americans is tied up in the stock market, Ryan argued, this "could mean the entire economy pays a steep price in the next market correction," as consumer spending would then likely turn negative.
While the richest Americans continue getting wealthier, the US labor market has entered a downturn, as the most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the American economy lost 92,000 jobs, and overall the economy has posted a net loss of 19,000 jobs since May 2025.
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Report Details How Trump Economic Agenda ‘Will Make Ordinary Families Reliably Poorer in the Future’
In just one year, Republicans' 2025 budget package is expected to increase income inequality at quadruple the rate seen over the past 40 years.
Feb 24, 2026
President Donald Trump's economic agenda "will make ordinary families reliably poorer in the future," according to the author of a report published Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute.
Josh Bivens, EPI's chief economist, said Trump's slashing of federal spending and jobs, mass deportations, chaotic tariffs, and anti-labor policies were suppressing hiring and wages, draining household and business spending, and slowing economic growth.
While a recession is not yet inevitable, Bivens argued that worrying signs are already on the horizon, with 1.4 million fewer new jobs than expected in 2025 and unemployment ticking up to 4.4%, up from the low of 3.4% in April 2023.
For low-wage earners, the past year has been particularly rough. After seeing unusually fast growth during the presidency of Joe Biden, real wages for the bottom 10% of earners fell by 0.3% in 2025.
The report predicts that Republicans' 2025 budget package will reduce “aggregate demand” in the coming years. The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act cuts $100 billion annually from Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), while allowing health insurance subsidies that saved families thousands to expire, which the report projects will cause many families who rely on these benefits to pull back spending in the economy.
While the law reduced taxes, the vast majority of those benefits went to the wealthiest earners, whose spending was already much less constrained by their incomes.
The report notes the astonishing increase in inequality caused by the law. Between the years of 1979 and 2019, which were considered to have seen an explosion of wealth inequality, the share of income claimed by the richest 10% increased by about 0.25% per year.
It found that the GOP budget law will, in just one year, increase the top decile's share of wealth by a full percentage point. In other words, the rate of inequality will "quadruple in its first year."
Aside from this major driver of inequality, the report also says that the Trump administration's hostility toward collective bargaining rights and its mass firings of federal workers would further suppress wages by making the labor market less competitive, and that the president's erratic tariff regime would make those wages less valuable by fueling inflation.
“Disastrous policy choices that led to excess unemployment, slower growth in the economy’s productive capacity, and rising inequality have made life less affordable for typical families in recent decades," Bivens said. "The Trump administration’s policies double down on the worst policy decisions of this period and will make ordinary families reliably poorer in the future, even if an outright recession or spiking inflation does not happen."
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Republican Unveils Bill to Let Billionaires Escape Proposed Wealth Tax in California
California's roughly 200 billionaires have more than $2 trillion collectively. Rep. Kevin Kiley said it's "unfair" to tax 5% of it to fund healthcare coverage for 3.4 million people at risk of losing it.
Feb 19, 2026
As Sen. Bernie Sanders barnstorms California to champion a proposed wealth tax on billionaires, a Republican congressman has joined the tech and crypto tycoons trying to stop the proposition in its tracks.
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) United Healthcare Workers West, the union that launched the effort, is currently working to gather nearly 900,000 signatures by April get the proposal on the ballot.
If they're successful, Californians will have the chance to vote this November for a one-time 5% tax on people in the state with more than $1 billion, which is projected to raise about $100 billion over the next few years to support healthcare spending gutted by President Donald Trump.
Proponents of state or local tax increases on the rich have often had to face fears that their proposals will backfire, leading CEOs to flee the state to protect their riches.
Indeed, several of the state's billionaires have signaled that they may leave the state or pull assets if they are required to pay the tax—including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
California's proposal, however, avoids this problem by requiring any billionaire who resided in the state as of January 1, 2026, to pay the one-time tax, even if they move.
Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) on Wednesday announced plans to introduce legislation that would protect these billionaires from any plans to "confiscate" their wealth if they decide to flee.
The bill prohibits California and any other state that may try something similar from imposing a retroactive tax on individuals who no longer reside there.
“California’s proposed wealth tax is an unprecedented attempt to chase down people who have already left as a result of the state’s poor policies,” Kiley said. “As a result, many of our state’s leading job creators are leaving preemptively. No state should be allowed to reach back in time and impose a new tax on someone who no longer lives there. That is fundamentally unfair.”
Proponents of the tax argue that the unequal distribution of wealth it's meant to address is quite a bit more "unfair" than a tax hike on the state's richest would be—especially after Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year handed a historically large tax break to the wealthiest 1% of Americans, while social services for the poor were cut across the board.
"Last year alone, after receiving the largest tax break in history, the 938 billionaires in America became $1.5 trillion richer," Sanders shouted to a booing crowd at a rally in Los Angeles on Wednesday.
He emphasized that the roughly 200 billionaires in California are collectively worth more than $2 trillion and that paying just a single 5% tax on their wealth would protect healthcare for more than 3.4 million people facing coverage losses due to federal Medicaid cuts.
Billionaires in the state have marshaled huge war chests and hired seasoned campaign veterans to promote rival ballot measures aimed at undercutting the wealth tax.
One committee, backed by Brin, has already raised $35 million from industry barons around the state, according to Politico. Crypto mogul Chris Larsen has dumped $2 million into Brin's committee and spent $5 million more to create his own.
Another committee is staffed by consultants associated with Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom—a likely 2028 presidential frontrunner who has also come out against the tax, warning that it would cause too great a drain on California's state treasury.
In remarks on the House floor introducing his bill, Kiley claimed that "$1 trillion has exited California simply in anticipation of this policy," though in reality, many billionaires have merely claimed they were preparing to leave without actually having done so yet.
Christopher Marquis and Nick Romeo explained in TIME on Wednesday that while this "tax-and-flee story" often spreads whenever a tax hike is proposed, it is "based on biased or sloppy arguments where anecdote replaces systematic evidence, correlation poses as causation, and every modest redistributive proposal is framed as an existential threat to prosperity."
They wrote that:
Discussion should not focus on whether one billionaire makes a threat, but on what the data show across years, across the tax base, and after real policy changes. According to the data analysis firm Altrata, there were over 33,000 New Yorkers worth $30 million or more as of 2025. Quoting some famous ones on either side of the issue makes for a good headline—but bad reasoning.
We should look instead to systematic studies, like this one by the Fiscal Policy Institute, which found no significant out-migration by residents of New York State in response to tax increases in either 2017 or 2021; the latter increase is estimated to raise approximately $3.6 billion annually.
Sanders said billionaires "lie a lot," noting that some wealthy New Yorkers pledged to flee the city if Zohran Mamdani—who also pledged to hike taxes on the rich—was elected mayor, threats that have largely not materialized.
"I'm sure these guys don't want to pay a few billion dollars more in taxes. But for them, in many ways, that is pocket change," Sanders said. "What they are saying is 'If you stand up to us... If you think it's more important that children get healthcare than that we get massive tax breaks, we are going to punish you... We're going to move. We're going to shut down businesses here.'"
He added: "All that the folks in California are saying is that at a time when the very rich are becoming phenomenally richer, when the very rich have been given a massive tax break by Donald Trump, when millions of people in this state are struggling to be able to afford healthcare, maybe billionaires should start paying their fair share of taxes."
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