If 228 years seems like a really long time, that’s because it is. But if current trends continue, that’s how long it will take for the average black family to reach the level of wealth the average white family has today.

The average Latino family fares slightly better—if the current trend continues, it would take them a little more than 80 years to amass the same amount of wealth white families have today.

Racial discrepancies in income and wealth are nothing new in this country. The troubling thing is that they aren’t improving. A new report by the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) compares data on white, black, and Latino households over the past 30 years to see just how big the gap is—and the findings are staggering.

Between 1983 and 2013, the average black family saw their wealth grow by a little less than $20,000. Latino families saw a bump of about $40,000. Meanwhile, the average white family’s wealth spiked by more than $300,000.

If current trends persist, the figures get even starker. By 2043, when people of color are predicted to outnumber white people for the first time in the U.S., the racial wealth gap will double—leaving the average white family with over $1 million more in assets than black and Latino families.

Wealth is an important barometer of long-term financial stability. It translates into a first home, retirement security, and the countless opportunities afforded by having savings and investments.  Those without wealth lead a precarious existence – they have no cushion to fall back on if tragedy strikes or when they grow old.

So how did wealth become so skewed along racial lines?

The legacy of overtly racist public policy is partly to blame. Redlining, the practice of deliberately blocking non-white families from obtaining a mortgage, had a devastating impact on homeownership for black and Latino families. From 1934 to 1968—the period marking the biggest expansion of the American middle class—only two percent of Federal Housing Administration mortgages went to non-whites. The effects of that kind of discrimination are still reverberating today.

Unfortunately, current policy has exacerbated the problem. Consider, for example, federal tax expenditures. These tax breaks—all $600 billion of them—are designed to help families pay for college, buy a home, save for retirement, and start a business.  The problem is, the people who need the most help tend to get the least. Working families get an average of $174 each year in tax breaks, while the typical millionaire gets $145,000.

The Internal Revenue Service does not collect data on race, but since we know income is heavily skewed towards white earners—four out of five earners in the top the top 20 percent are white—we can be reasonably confident that these tax breaks are disproportionately benefiting white earners.

The racial disparity continues to grow at the very top of the economic pyramid. On last year’s famed Forbes 400 list, which enumerates the 400 wealthiest people in the country, just seven people are black or Latino. That’s worth noting, since America’s wealthiest citizens control a tremendous amount of the country’s wealth: the top 100 members of the Forbes 400 list own about as much wealth as the entire African-American population (42 million people), while the top 186 members own as much wealth as the entire Latino population (55 million people).

In short, wealth is concentrated in very few hands. And those hands are mostly white.

But just as public policy played a role in growing the racial wealth divide, it can play a role in shrinking it. An important first step would be to conduct a government-wide audit, launched by an executive order from the next president, to understand the role current federal policies play in perpetuating (or closing) the racial wealth divide.

With that data, we can begin to overhaul inequitable policies and take the steps needed to ensure our nation’s wealth-building system works for all Americans.

This national trend is reflected in the wealth and earnings of Southern states like Georgia, where the median household of color has only $7,113 in net worth (compared to the $85,499 in net worth owned by white households). In Virginia, the median white household has a net worth nearly 12 times that of the median African-American household.

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One of the more striking findings from the Corporation for Enterprise Development’s (CFED) 2016 Assets & Opportunity Scorecard is just how wide the economic disparity is between whites and African-Americans in the South. The data in the Scorecard reveal a twofold truth: that family financial security is worse in the South than in any other region of the country; and that these stark disparities are inexorably tied to the racial inequality that has defined life in this nation since its founding.

That’s why CFED is calling on the next President, in his or her first 100 days in office, to take executive action to conduct a racial wealth divide audit. To execute this audit, the President would direct every federal agency to review existing federal policies and how they contribute to or alleviate this economic wealth disparity.

Wealth is about more than just money in the bank—it’s about assets of every type. There are a range of economic inequities that work in concert to limit the ability of households of color in southern states to achieve economic security at almost every turn:

• Savings: One reason for the low net worth of African-American households is their relative lack of savings. More than two-thirds (67 percent) of African-American households are liquid asset poor—meaning they don’t have enough savings to live at the poverty level for just three months if they lose a job or face another income loss—compared to 35 percent of white households. This includes 62 percent of African-American households in both Virginia and Texas, and over 80 percent in Alabama.

• Housing: Without the ability or means to save, African-American households are effectively shut out of the home purchase market. Today, fewer than half (44 percent) of all African-American households in southern states own their homes, compared to roughly 72 percent of white households. As a result, the majority of African-American households are forced into the rental market, where they pay a far greater percentage of their income on housing costs than do white households.
  The median white high school dropout has more wealth than the median African-American or Hispanic college graduate.
  

• Education: In four southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee—fewer than 10 percent of all African-American eighth-graders tested at a proficient level or above on math exams. At 4.8 percent, Alabama’s abysmal proficiency rate is the lowest in the country. This achievement gap bleeds into higher education as white students in the South graduate high school at a rate roughly 10 points higher than African-American students, and white adults hold four-year college degrees at a rate over 12 points higher than African-American adults. But the racial wealth divide seen across the country is not merely a function of the achievement gap: even after graduating from college, African-Americans and Hispanics accrue far less wealth than do white households. In fact, the median white high school dropout has more wealth than the median African-American or Hispanic college graduate.

• Jobs and Entrepreneurship: In the South, wage-earning African-Americans are unemployed at a rate (10.2 percent) more than twice that of white workers (4.6 percent). However, the disparities don’t end with unemployment as even African-American entrepreneurs in the South find themselves struggling to overcome sizable gaps in opportunity. On average, white-owned business in the southern states are worth 9.6 times ($694,877) that of the average African-American-owned business in the same southern states ($72,679).

These racial inequalities are not new, but they are persistent and growing, aided and abetted by bad public policy. These policies are choices—choices that we need to stop making.

Historically, one of the greatest contributors to the creation and expansion of the racial wealth divide has been racially-biased federal policies. The federal government has played an important role in helping families build wealth. However, many of the federal initiatives used to expand economic opportunity for white families systematically discriminated against households of color. Past transgressions include the exclusion of farmworkers and domestic workers from the Social Security Act in 1935; the racially biased implementation of the GI Bill; and the widespread practice of redlining by the Federal Housing Administration which shut out entire communities of color from purchasing a home. This discrimination continues to have an impact today, as white families transferred their wealth to successive generations, while families of color were denied that same opportunity. The result is a racial wealth divide that has left white households with nine times more wealth ($110,637) than households of color ($12,377).

Moreover, these types of bad policies are not just historical relics. Today, for example, tax policies such as the Mortgage Interest Deduction and reduced tax rates on capital gains not only overwhelmingly benefit wealthy households, but they also disproportionately concentrate benefits in white communities. And because states are allowed to opt out of expanding Medicaid, a new health care coverage gap has emerged for a great number of the country’s most vulnerable communities, including 1.7 million adults of color.

In order to address widespread wealth inequality in the South and elsewhere, policymakers have to intentionally address the policies that continue to leave communities of color behind. A racial wealth divide audit conducted by every federal agency will help us create policies that will ultimately help to close the racial wealth divide.

With the new knowledge provided by an audit, federal policymakers will be able to take—and citizens will be able to demand—the actions necessary to rectify racial economic inequities that have been fueled by generations of discriminatory policies.

In 2008, Ohio passed the Short Term Loan Act, which established a number of protections against predatory payday lending and other small dollar loans, including setting a 28 percent rate cap on payday loans.

Not surprisingly, the Ohio payday industry immediately tried to overturn the law through a ballot initiative. So what did Ohioans decide? They voted overwhelmingly (64 percent) to affirm the Short Term Loan Act, including the 28 percent rate cap. (Fun fact: the Ohio payday industry spent $16 million on the ballot initiative effort, while opponents spent just $265,000).

For the past seven years, however, payday lenders have deliberately defied the will of Ohio voters by continuing to saddle consumers with triple-digit interest rates on loans—some as high as 763 percent. They do this by using two older Ohio laws—the Mortgage Lending Act and Small Loan Act—to take out different lending licenses that allow them to circumvent the protections put in place by the Short Term Loan Act.

There are now 836 payday and auto title lenders in Ohio—more than the number of McDonald’s in the state. These lenders are so good at bypassing state laws that every year they rake in $502 million in loan fees alone. That’s more than twice the amount they earned in 2005, three years before the 28 percent rate cap was set.

Unfortunately, payday lenders scheming to avoid state consumer protection laws isn’t just a problem in Ohio—it’s a problem throughout the country. Time and again, whenever states crack down on abusive, small dollar lending, payday lenders find creative ways to continue business as usual:

• In Texas, payday lenders are dodging state laws by posing as Credit Access Businesses (a tactic also employed by Ohio payday lenders). By disguising themselves as a completely different kind of financial service provider—one that isn’t subject to the limits imposed on payday lenders—they are able to essentially continue to act like payday lenders.

• In states where payday lending is prohibited—such as Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, and others—lenders utilize online lending to broker deals with consumers within those same states.

• In many other states with payday loans restrictions, lenders have established partnerships with Native American reservations to circumvent the law.

The moral of the story is clear: even if every state had protections on the books, lenders would find new ways to get around them.

But the good news is that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) can help to crack down on these abuses.

Earlier this spring, the CFPB released a proposed framework for regulations that would govern the small dollar lending industry. As currently written, however, it would leave a number of glaring loopholes that are ripe for exploitation by payday lenders.

For starters, the proposal doesn’t address the problem of unscrupulous online lenders. It also fails to address the main cause of payday debt traps: the fact that lenders aren’t required to determine a borrower’s ability to repay a loan, even as they continue to peddle more and more loans to “help” a consumer dig out of a hole.

The CFPB can’t eliminate all the circumvention and abuses by payday lenders, but it can help. To do that, it needs to issue the strongest rules possible—and soon. It’s been eight months since the release of the regulatory framework and the CFPB has yet to offer an official proposal. Low-income Americans across the country need the CFPB to act fast.

That’s why we at CFED launched the Consumers Can’t Wait Campaign—to call on the CFPB to release strong rules on payday lending now. Until the CFPB acts, the profitable practice of ensnaring millions of American consumers in debt traps will continue to thrive unabated.