Income Inequality

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 families do live in states such as New York and Connecticut, IRS data make clear that rising inequality and increases in top 1 percent incomes affect every state.

The rise between 1979 and 2007 in top 1 percent incomes relative to the bottom 99 percent represents a sharp reversal of the trend that prevailed in the mid-20th century. This earlier era was characterized by a rising minimum wage, low levels of unemployment after the 1930s, widespread collective bargaining in private industries, and a cultural and political environment in which it was outrageous for executives to receive outsized bonuses while laying off workers. Today, millions of Americans feel tremendous anxiety about their grasp on the American Dream.

In 2013, income inequality was much higher in many states, metropolitan areas, and counties than for the United States overall. In 2013 the top 1 percent of families nationally made 25.3 times as much as the bottom 99 percent (Sommeiller, Price, and Wazeter 2016).

Publications

State of Working Colorado 2018

At a cursory glance, Colorado has much to celebrate in terms of low unemployment and poverty levels, but scratching the surface of the data reveals troubling trends fraught with wage stagnation and disparities.

CCLP produces the State of Working Colorado every year to gauge how the economy is performing for workers across the income spectrum. The publication is intended to help stakeholders and policymakers determine where to focus their efforts in revitalizing opportunities and prosperity for hard-working Coloradans across the racial spectrum.

Refundable tax credits for working families put kids first

Poverty rates in Ohio remain high despite improvements in the job market. There were still 115,000 more Ohioans living in poverty in 2017 than in the year prior to the last recession.Child poverty is exceedingly high. Cleveland has the highest child poverty in the nation — nearly half of all kids. Cincinnati had the third highest child poverty rate in the nation. More than 513,000 Ohio kids lived below the poverty line last year. This has long term consequences for our children and our state. Policy makers have failed to address this crisis. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a tax policy designed to help. Yet, Ohio’s EITC remains one of the weakest in the nation.

Media

State of Working Philadelphia 2018

  • October 25, 2018
  • Mark Price

Each Labor Day the Keystone Research Center releases an annual checkup on the health of the Pennsylvania labor market, “The State of Working Pennsylvania.” (https://www.keystoneresearch.org/SWP2018). The 2018 edition focused on state-level data, mostly available through June 2018. This addendum to that report focuses on 2017 data released last month by the Census Bureau on incomes and poverty for Philadelphia. We complement the Census data with statistics on employment and unemployment from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to provide a comprehensive assessment of the performance of the Philadelphia economy since 2005. We start with the year 2005 as that is the first year in which data at the county level are available from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Growing Jobs, Stagnant Wages, Increasing Inequality and Rising Prices

By many measures, Washington’s economy has soared since the Great Recession. The state has added over 400,000 jobs since 2008 – more than making up for previous losses – and average hourly wages have climbed 13 percent after adjusting for inflation. However, those rosy numbers mask the fact that sluggish wage growth, increasing inequality and rising prices are leaving many Washington residents struggling.