Trickle-down

The news is discouraging, unless, of course, this was the whole point:

The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly available government data from 2009.

These lopsided wealth ratios are the largest since the government began publishing such data a quarter century ago and roughly twice the size of the ratios that had prevailed between these three groups for the two decades prior to the Great Recession that ended in 2009.

That is, many have long complained that trickle-down economic theory actually increases wealth gaps in society. The newly-released study from the Pew Center does not shock anyone for suggesting that the wealth gap is growing. But I suspect few trickle-down critics actually expected an eighteen- to twenty-fold gap reflecting ethnicity.