Oregon’s rich getting richer and all others falling behind, wage study shows, By Jeff Manning, January 24, 2010, The Oregonian: “A new analysis of state wages shows that the gulf between Oregon’s wealthy and everyone else continues to widen. Oregon’s wealthiest are not only earning more, but the rate at which their incomes are growing far outstrips the middle class and the poor. Meanwhile, the middle class continued to encounter stagnant wages this past decade — even during the vaunted economic boom that preceded the bust — and saw its compensation fall back to 2001 levels in the recession-racked year of 2008, according to a draft analysis of wage trends by the Oregon Employment Department. Inflation-adjusted annual wages for Oregon’s top 2 percent of earners hit $153,480 on average in 2008, a 29.5 percent increase from 1990. Workers at the 50 percentile, meanwhile, earned $32,659 in 2008, an increase of just 2.4 percent over 1990 after adjusting for inflation…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty