Economic Inequality In The United States

Since 1919, the wage gap between the top one percent and the workforce basically remained stable. However, in the early 1980’s the gap between this richest one percent and the rest of the workforce significantly widened.
The disparities between rich and middle and poor, ballooned accordingly. In 1979, the top 1 percent averaged 8 times more than middle-income families and 23 times more than the poorest 20 percent. By 2005, this top 1 percent grew to 21 times the income of middle-income families and 70 times the average income of the poorest 20 percent.
In the past 25 years the definition of what is wealth has undergone a significant change. In 1982, the first year of the Forbes wealthiest 400 list, it took about $159 million in today’s dollars to make the list; in 2008, the minimum amount of wealth needed to make the list was $1.3 billion, (Arango & Creswell, 2008).
This meant that during this quarter-century, the average income of the top layer more than tripled, rising 228 percent from $319,000 to $1.1 million. During the same period, the average income of the poorest fifth grew only 6 percent and the average income of the middle fifth grew 21 percent, less than one percent a year. In recent years this gap has been growing at a faster pace, for example from 2003 to 2005, the average household in the top one percent enjoyed an increase of $465,700 in annual income; while the average household in the bottom 20 percent saw an increase of only $200, and those in the middle fifth saw a rise of just $2,400.
A Congressional Budget Office report (World Press.com, 2007) provided other metrics for gauging the staggering growth of economic inequality. The total 2005 income of the top three million Americans was equivalent to the total income of the bottom 166 million.