{"id":287860,"date":"2016-12-30T18:37:57","date_gmt":"2016-12-30T17:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/income-inequality-is-off-the-charts-can-local-policies-make-a-difference\/"},"modified":"2016-12-30T18:37:57","modified_gmt":"2016-12-30T17:37:57","slug":"income-inequality-is-off-the-charts-can-local-policies-make-a-difference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/income-inequality-is-off-the-charts-can-local-policies-make-a-difference\/","title":{"rendered":"Income Inequality Is Off the Charts. Can Local Policies Make a Difference?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p><span class=\"wf_caption\" style=\"display: block; max-width: 640px; width: 100%;\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/images\/Images_2016_12\/2016.30.12_anderson_orig.jpg\" alt=\"Occupy Wall Street protesters sleep on the sidewalk near the New York Stock Exchange, April 16, 2012. (Marcus Yam \/ The New York Times)\" style=\"width: 100%;\" width=\"640\"\/><span style=\"display: block;\">Occupy Wall Street protesters sleep on the sidewalk near the New York Stock Exchange, April 16, 2012. (Marcus Yam \/ The New York Times)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>The income gap between the classes is growing at a startling pace in the United States. In 1980, the top 1 percent earned on average 27 times more than workers in the bottom 50 percent. Today, they earn 81 times more.<\/p>\n<p>The widening gap is &#8220;due to a boom in capital income,&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/equitablegrowth.org\/research-analysis\/economic-growth-in-the-united-states-a-tale-of-two-countries\/\" target=\"_blank\">according to research<\/a> by French economist Thomas Piketty. That means the rich are living off of their wealth rather than investing it in businesses that create jobs, as Republican, <a href=\"http:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/magazine\/29\/burying-supply-side-once-and-for-all\/\" target=\"_blank\">supply-side economics<\/a> predicts they would do.<\/p>\n<p>Piketty played a pivotal role in pushing income inequality to the center of public discussions in 2013 with his book, <em>Capital in the Twenty-First Century<\/em>. In a new working paper, he and his co-authors report that the average national income per adult grew by 61 percent in the United States between 1980 and 2014. But only the highest earners benefited from that growth.<\/p>\n<p>For those in the top 1 percent, income rose 205 percent. Meanwhile, the average pre-tax income of the bottom 50 percent of workers was basically unchanged, stagnating &#8220;at about $16,000 per adult after adjusting for inflation,&#8221; the paper reads.<\/p>\n<p>It notes that this trend has important political consequences: &#8220;An economy that fails to deliver growth for half of its people for an entire generation is bound to generate discontent with the status quo and a rejection of establishment politics.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But the authors also note that the trend is not inevitable or irreversible. In France, for example, the bottom 50 percent of pre-tax income grew by about the same rate &#8212; 32 percent &#8212; as the overall national income per adult from 1980 to 2014.<\/p>\n<p>The difference? In the United States, &#8220;the stagnation of bottom 50 percent of incomes and the upsurge in the top 1 percent coincided with drastically reduced progressive taxation, widespread deregulation of industries and services, particularly the financial services&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/news\/item\/38929-income-inequality-is-off-the-charts-can-local-policies-make-a-difference\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Occupy Wall Street protesters sleep on the sidewalk near the New York Stock Exchange, April 16, 2012. (Marcus Yam \/ The New York Times) The income gap between the classes is growing at a startling pace in the United States. In 1980, the top 1 percent earned on average 27 times more than workers in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":287861,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-287860","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287860\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}