Extreme Inequality
| What should we be calling this era of extreme inequality we’re all living through? The Second Gilded Age? Or do you have have a better idea? Enter our new Name Our Epoch contest— by July 31 — and Barbara Ehrenreich, Walter Moseley, and Howard Zinn will chose the winner! |
The top one percent of households received 22.9 percent of all pre-tax
income in 2006, more than double what that figure was in the 1970s.
This is the greatest concentration of income since
the Gilded Age of 1928, when 23.9 percent of all income went to the richest one percent.
Since 1968, the year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the
income gap between blacks and whites narrowed by only 3 cents on the
dollar. In 2005 the median per capita income in the United States stood
at $16,629 for blacks and $28,946 for whites. At this slow rate of
progress, income equality will not be achieved for 537 years.
The Working Group on Extreme Inequality understands that to achieve social justice, we must both “raise the floor” by creating pathways out of poverty, and challenge the extreme wealth and power that increasingly concentrate at the tippy top. SmartMeme is supporting the working group in developing their narrative strategy to change the story of wealth and inequality in the US.
Based at the
Institute for Policy Studies, the Working Group is a coalition-in-formation. Visit the extreme inequality blog.
Watch the Extreme Inequality Video Blog from GritTV