Inequality is declining by every measurable metric in the United States.
Edit: To answer the folk naysaying with their ten second Google searches, the income inequality rate has declined between 2007 and 2019(1), helped by a strong wage recovery in the late 2010s. The share of wealth held by the top 10% peaked around 2015 and has declined steadily since. 2022 was a very bad year for equity markets and has hit wealthy households particularly hard.
These are all pretty findable and uncontroversial statistics, but unfortunately one political tribe has invested a lot of capital in the notion inequality is inexorably increasing, so there’s a lot of pundit mileage in contorting these stats.(2) Which is sad, because these stats are good news for anyone who truly cares about inequality.
(1) I’m book-ending at 2019 because pandemic era macro is weird, and will take us some years to understand.
(2) I’m not making a partisan point here - stats are stats, and both political tribes lie endlessly about them when convenient.