In a Pew poll conducted last fall, 61% of all respondents agreed that there's too much income inequality in America these days.

Virtually everyone can feel that the difference between the wealthiest Americans and the poorest Americans is growing out of control, but we don't understand how big that gap is, or how fast it's expanding, or how many Americans are losing money because of it.

When viewed through the data in this report, that huge gap in income inequality doesn't look so much like a law of nature as it does a massive heist.

That's about a thousand dollars or more per weekly paycheck that you could have spent in your community, invested in home improvements, or saved for a rainy day, but which instead went to the wealthiest Americans.

This is why Americans don't have that $400 — that money, and much more, has gone to some rich guy's offshore bank account.

"If you look at income from 1947 to 1975, it more or less grew with per-capita GDP across the board," Price said.

The incomes of the poorest Americans and the wealthiest Americans were all growing at roughly the same rate.

"There have certainly been a lot of studies that indicate that lower inequality supports faster economic growth," Price said

Now that we understand the real price of income inequality, it will be easier to press our leaders into getting our money back

"If they understand this as a $50 trillion problem," Goldstein said, "we have a better shot at getting a $50 trillion solution."