Combined net worth of America’s richest rises

Amid unprecedented income inequality in the United States, a new report released Monday shows that the richest Americans are getting richer.

According to Forbes, the 400 richest people in the US posted a combined net worth of $2 trillion in 2013, up from $1.7 trillion a year ago.

The combined net worth of $2 trillion is the highest ever recorded by Forbes, reflecting the widening inequality between the exceptionally wealthy and the rest of the country.

The latest figure is more than the combined net worth of the bottom half of all Americans.

The average net worth of a Forbes 400 member this year is a staggering $5 billion, the highest to date, up from $4.2 billion last year.

The net worth for America’s wealthiest people has risen in the years after the financial crisis, while many American adults are still struggling financially with lower incomes and unemployment.

According to a recent analysis of Internal Revenue Service data, the top 1 percent of US earners collected 19.3 percent of household income in 2012, their largest share going back a century.

A recent Pew Research Center survey found that more than half of US adults, or 54 percent, said they feel their household incomes have “hardly recovered at all” since the recession.

The Pew survey also showed that the public sees government policies as having mostly benefited large corporations and wealthy people, while doing little or nothing to help poor and working class Americans.

In September 2011, an angry uprising led to the creation of the Occupy movement. The movement created the concept of the 99 percent of working class people against the 1 percent of highest income earners.