Income Gap Between Rich And The Rest Of Us Still Growing

(Cartoon image is by Steve Sack in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.)

The Republican Party, in the modern era, has clung to the "trickle-down" economic policy -- the idea that giving more to the rich benefits everyone in the country, because much of that money will trickle down to everyone else. It has never worked that way, and it got so bad in the 1920's that it led to the Great Depression.

Democrats took over then and instituted economic policies that were much fairer, and for a few decades the middle class grew and the poor were taken care of through a decent minimum wage and government programs. But the GOP was able to again seize power about 1980, and they immediately went back to their failed trickle-down policies.

Since then, the income gap between the richest Americans and the rest of America has grown substantially. The growth of this income gap was kicked into high gear with the tax cuts initiated by George Bush and Donald Trump. Now a new report shows that gap continues to grow and is once again approaching a dangerous level. The Republicans either are blind to the danger this gap poses or don't care. That is a major reason why they must be voted out of power in 2020.

The following is part of a post by Bill Chappell on the NPR website about the continued growth of the income gap:

The gap between the richest and the poorest U.S. households is now the largest it's been in the past 50 years — despite the median U.S. income hitting a new record in 2018, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

U.S. income inequality was "significantly higher" in 2018 than in 2017, the federal agency says in its latest American Community Survey report. The last time a change in the metric was deemed statistically significant was when it grew from 2012-2013.

While many states didn't see a change in income inequality last year, the income gap grew wider in nine states: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Kansas, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Texas and Virginia.

The disparity grew despite a surging national economy that has seen low unemployment and more than 10 years of consecutive GDP growth.

The most troubling thing about the new report, says William M. Rodgers III, a professor of public policy and chief economist at the Heldrich Center at Rutgers University, is that it "clearly illustrates the inability of the current economic expansion, the longest on record, to lessen inequality."When asked why the rising economic tide has raised some boats more than others, Rodgers lists several factors, including the decline of organized labor and competition for jobs from abroad. He also cites tax policies that favor businesses and higher-income families.

Income inequality is measured through the Gini index, which measures how far apart incomes are from each other. To do that, the index assigns a hypothetical score of 0.0 to a population in which incomes are distributed perfectly evenly and a score of 1.0 to a population where only one household gets all of the income.

In the U.S., the Gini index figure had been holding steady for the past several years. But it moved from 0.482 in 2017 to 0.485 in 2018. While that change may seem small, it's statistically significant, the Census Bureau says. The agency notes that back in 2006, the figure stood at 0.464.