The Huffington Post piece is true, but grossly misleading.
There are essentially two ways to measure and compare economic well-being: income and wealth. Wealth is a “stock” measuring one’s assets minus liabilities. Anyone can (and occassionally should) add up all their financial and real assets, at market value, and subtract their liabilities in order to get their net worth.
Income is a flow, measured over a period of time, such as a month or year.
Wealth is far more unequally distributed than income, which may be why the left-leaning Huff Post likes to concentrate on it. Furthermore, the trend is to more and more unequal distribution over recent decades as people are conned into taking on more and more credit card debt to buy goodies. Many decades ago, before credit cards, everyone had savings accounts and rainy-day money, even the poor. Now we just assume we can hit our CC if an emergency presents itself. This all helps account for the growing disparity in “wealth”.
Income still looks to be very unequal in America, and appears to be
getting more so over time. But even income figures can be misleading. The measures of “income” say nothing about consumption, which is far more equally distributed. One reason is that government figures ignor “in kind” income, such as food stamps, housing subsidies, free child care, etc., all of which have exploded in scope and size in recent years. So a “poor” family may have only a $20,000 official income, but may be consuming at a $40,000 level, year after year.
Official income figures also ignor underground work, cash income, etc. Also, income government income figures always talk about before-tax income, not after-tax., a big factor with our state and federal progressive tax structure.
Economic well-being is tricky to measure, and should always include all the assumptions and definitions.
