Inequality
In the workplace, how many workers can protect their best interest.
Stanford center goes to press to battle poverty
The three top Democratic presidential candidates answered a November invitation to contribute an essay proposing tactics for a new "war on poverty." Their essays were written exclusively for the quarterly magazine, which premieres this month in print and online at www. inequality.com. Republican contenders declined the invitation.
... the real incomes of Americans across the income spectrum did rise in the late 1990s, but they fell again after 2000. Most of the gains in recent years have been captured by Americans much further up the income scale, producing a conspicuously wide gap between the incomes of the nation’s rich and poor children, elders, and adults.
The 1994–2005 period encompasses, however, a dramatic shift in how the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution fared. I next distinguish between the 1994–2000 expansion of the Clinton administration and the 2002–2005 expansion of the Bush administration. During both expansions, the incomes of the top 1 percent grew extremely quickly, as seen in Figure 2, at an annual rate of over 10 percent. However, while the bottom 99 percent of incomes grew at a solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1994–2000, these incomes grew less than 1 percent per year from 2002–2005. Therefore, in the economic expansion of 2002–2005, the top 1 percent captured almost three quarters of income growth. Those results may help explain the disconnect between the economic experiences of the public and the solid macroeconomic growth posted by the U.S. economy since 2002. Those results may also help explain why the dramatic growth in top incomes during the Clinton administration did not generate much public outcry while there has been an extraordinary level of attention to top incomes in the press and in the public debate over the last two years. Moreover, top income tax rates went up in 1993 during the Clinton administration (and hence a larger share of the gains made by top incomes was redistributed) while top income tax rates went down in 2001 during the Bush administration.
Updated CBO data reveal unprecedented increase in inequality
The CBO data reveal the severe depth of our inequality problem. Though overall tax reductions during this period have meant slightly faster post-tax income growth for households in each income group, it has made little difference to the overall picture of inequality and has even exacerbated unequal outcomes over this period.
Such concentration of income is unsustainable in a democratic society. The distribution mechanisms that have historically worked to ensure much more equitable outcomes appear to be wholly inoperative. Fixing them must be at the heart of any serious economic policy discussion.
From 2003-2005, an amazing $400 billion in pre-tax dollars was shifted from the bottom 95% of households to those in the top 5% (all income data in this report are inflation adjusted and in 2005 dollars). In other words, had income shares not shifted as they did, the income of each of the 109 million households in the bottom 95% would have been $3,660 higher in 2005.
Race, Poverty, and the
Neoliberal Agenda in
the United States: Lessons from Katrina and Rita
the richest 1 percent of people in the world get as much income as the poorest 57 percent. The richest 5 percent had in 1993 an average income 114 times greater than that of the poorest 5 percent, rising 78 times in 1988. The poorest 5 percent grew poorer, losing 25 percent of their real income, while the richest 20 percent saw their real incomes grow by 12 percent, more than twice as high as average world income. World inequality grew because inequality grew between and within countries. The rich nations grew richer and the poor nations grew poorer; the rich within each country grew richer at the expense of the poor.
Deregulation contributes to inequality.