America's current economic woes are eliciting comparisons to the 1980s — another era with sky-high inflation, rising interest rates and jittery financial markets, not to mention a taste for heavy eye makeup.

The disparity would be even more stark if the report only counted marketable wealth and ignored the benefits of defined-benefit payments, such as pension plans or Social Security, the CBO noted.

The nation's shifting financial fortunes underscore the deep structural changes in the economy since the U.S. loosened trade, largely eliminated pensions, cut higher-education funding and saw union membership drop to historic lows.

Home equity, long a springboard for working-class people to achieve upward mobility, played a relatively small role for the wealthiest, according to the CBO.

Instead, the largest contributor to upper-echelon wealth was business equity, investment real estate, financial securities and inheritance trusts, the CBO found.

An analysis released Wednesday by the Financial Times finds that while the U.S. and U.K. have some enormously wealthy people, the poorest Americans are worse off than their European counterparts, with a lower standard of living than their peers in Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland or Germany.

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