When a Rising Tide Sinks Most Boats: Trends in US Income Inequality

Pavlina Tcherneva

Economics Policy Note Archive from Levy Economics Institute

Abstract: In the postwar period, with every subsequent expansion, a smaller and smaller share of the gains in income growth have gone to the bottom 90 percent of families. Worse, in the latest expansion, while the economy has grown and average real income has recovered from its 2008 lows, all of the growth has gone to the wealthiest 10 percent of families, and the income of the bottom 90 percent has fallen. Most Americans have not felt that they have been part of the expansion. We have reached a situation where a rising tide sinks most boats. This policy note provides a broader overview of the increasingly unequal distribution of income growth during expansions, examines some of the changes that occurred from 2012 to 2013, and identifies a disturbing business cycle trend. It also suggests that policy must go beyond the tax system if we are serious about reversing the drastic worsening of income inequality.

Date: 2015-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/pn_15_4.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/pn_15_4.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://levyweb.bard.edu/pubs/pn_15_4.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lev:levypn:15-4

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Policy Note Archive from Levy Economics Institute
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Elizabeth Dunn ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).