A new report (PDF) from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, shows the state of the union as far as income inequality goes, and, well, it’s pretty harsh. See below for a state-by-state ranking, from top to bottom ratio.
Daily Beast
February 2, 2015
The plunge in oil prices is great for Americans who drive with the average household expected to save about $750 on gas this year. But the rapid price drop is causing lots of layoffs for oil workers. Those losses could begin to spill over into other parts of the economy, especially in once fast growing parts of the country like Texas. “I don’t want to call this strong growth until it actually starts pushing up wages and prices,” says Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
CNN Money
February 2, 2015
Linda Dempsey and Robert Scott talked about the Obama administration’s calls for more presidential authority in crafting international trade deals, as well as negotiations over the Trans Pacific Partnership.
C-SPAN
January 30, 2015
The graph comes from the Economic Policy Institute, and it outlines one of the stranger facets of the recovery. Unemployment has fallen to normal levels — 5.6 percent unemployment was routine in, say, 1995, a year that few remember as some sort of labor market hellscape. But the fall in unemployment isn’t just driven by people getting jobs. It’s also driven by workers disappearing from the labor market.
VOX
January 30, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank, examined federal tax data, state-by-state, and found the national trend of lopsided growth persists. The center’s report is titled The Increasingly Unequal States Of America. The research was led by Estelle Sommeiller, a socio-economist at the Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales in France, and Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg, Penn. Price told NPR that since 1979, “in almost every state, there’s been more growth in income for the top one percent, than for the bottom 99 percent [of Americans].”
NPR
January 30, 2015
Average income for the very highest-income workers in the District is 32.3 times higher than the average income for everyone else, according to a separate report by the Economic Policy Institute. If DC were compared to the states on that metric, it would rank eighth.
A family budget calculator from the Economic Policy Institute suggests that a two-parent, two-child household in the Washington area needs to earn $89,643 per year to cover the costs of housing, food, transportation, education, taxes, and other living expenses. This, too, reinforces how much more difficult it’s become to get by in DC. Full-time employment at $12.62 per hour translates into annual pay of just $26,250.
Washingtonian Magazine
January 29, 2015
The new report by the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity, convened by the Center for American Progress, is frank in its acknowledgment of the inequality crisis. “Today, the ability of free-market democracies to deliver widely shared increases in prosperity is in question as never before,” the report declares. It calls for several measures of the sort that the labor movement, the Economic Policy Institute, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and others on the left edge of Democratic politics have been urging for years. What’s surprising is not what’s being said but who’s saying it.
The American Prospect
January 29, 2015
Move to Arkansas. The bar is much lower there. It only takes $228,298 to get into the upper echelon in Arkansas, according to a report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. But in Connecticut, which has the highest threshold, it takes $677,608 to make it into that elite group. Researchers looked at IRS data for 2012 tax returns by state.
CNN Money
January 28, 2015
This week, the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, released a very cool analysis of how the top 1 percent of earners in each U.S. state has grown its share of income since 1979. The overarching point is that the story of American inequality isn’t just about Wall Street financiers from New York or Connecticut gobbling up an ever-growing share of the country’s economy. Rather, the affluent are pulling away from their neighbors all over the country, from Portland to Palm Beach.
Slate
January 28, 2015
For more than three decades, that upper echelon of earners has gobbled up disproportionate shares of income growth in each state, pushing income inequality to levels not seen since the 1920′s, according to a new report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. And while the financial sector has received much of the blame for the ever-growing gap in incomes, the trend is more widespread, the report’s authors argue: The rise in inequality experienced in the United States in the past three-and-a-half decades is not just a story of those in the financial sector in the greater New York City metropolitan area reaping outsized rewards from speculation in financial markets. While many of the highest-income taxpayers do live in states like New York and Connecticut, IRS data make clear that rising inequality and increases in top 1 percent incomes affect every state.
The Washington Post
January 27, 2015