Income Inequality in the US

As income gap balloons, is it holding back growth?, July 10, 2011, National Public Radio: “Members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors tend to speak cautiously: Their words can move markets. Yet last month, Fed governor Sarah Bloom Raskin was remarkably candid about the growing gap between America’s rich and poor. ‘This inequality is destabilizing and undermines the ability of the economy to grow sustainably and efficiently,’ she said. Income inequality, she continued, is ‘anathema to the social progress that is part and parcel of such growth.’ The income gap in the United States has ballooned: It’s wider than any time since 1928, in the days before the stock market crash triggered the Great Depression. The numbers are startling: Top CEO salaries were up 23 percent last year, according to the New York Times; the average worker’s pay was up only .5 percent. Meanwhile, the top 0.1 percent of American earners now take in more than 10 percent of the nation’s collective income. That puts the U.S. in the same inequality ballpark as developing countries like Cameroon and Ivory Coast…”