When George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, one of his major campaign themes was creating an “ownership society,” in which a larger share of Americans owned homes, securities and other assets.

“Ownership in our society should not be an exclusive club,” he said at a Rancho Cucamonga, California, campaign stop. “Independence should not be a gated community. Everyone should be a part owner in the American dream.”

In 2003 he followed through on his promises by persuading Congress to cut tax rates on dividends by as much as 57 percent and reduce the top rate on capital gains from 20 percent to 15 percent, saying it would encourage more people to own stocks.

The next year, as he was gearing for re-election, he said, “If you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of our country. The more ownership there is in America, the more vitality there is in America and the more people have a vital stake in the future of this country.”

Bush sought to eliminate the estate tax, saying it would encourage more savings. He built his case largely on claiming estate taxes forced the sale of family farms — though his administration could never point to a single example. Today couples can shield more than $10 million from this levy and, with careful planning, can pass unlimited sums tax free.

He also urged Congress to approve mortgages with zero down payment, and banking regulators on his watch were told not to interfere when fee-hungry bankers made no-documentation real estate loans — what even those in the industry called liar’s loans — and then packaged them and sold them off as mortgage-backed securities to gullible investors.

So did his tax cuts and easy mortgage loans help make more Americans part-owners of the American dream? No. Instead what followed was a severe narrowing of ownership.

Home ownership last year fell to its lowest level since 1995, long before Bush took office. The rate is expected to drift further down because a weak job market and falling wages mean fewer people can afford to buy homes.

In the case of stocks and dividends, there has been an enormous concentration in the pockets of the richest Americans, my new analysis of official data from the Internal Revenue Service shows.

In 2012 the number of taxpayers reporting capital gains plummeted to fewer than 9.8 million, a 39 percent decline from the 16.2 million taxpayers with gains in 2000. The dollar value of capital gains also fell sharply in that period, down almost 23 percent, to $644.9 billion. These figures come from IRS table 1.4, which one of my Syracuse University research assistants, Zhibo Zhang, adjusted for inflation to 2012 dollars.

That 6.4 million fewer taxpayers reported capital gains understates how much ownership narrowed, since population grew over those 12 years. In 2000, 1 in 8 taxpayers reported capital gains. By 2012, just 1 in 15 did.

Even among the top one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans, those making more than $2 million a year, ownership of stocks narrowed, with the number reporting gains falling almost 10 percent in that period.

In fact, only one income group showed an increase in the number of people with capital gains from 2000 to 2012: The rapidly growing segment of taxpayers who report negative incomes — meaning that while in reality salaries, dividends, capital gains and other income flowed to them, to the IRS these 2.1 million taxpayers legally reported income of less than zero.