New study says income inequality for families is growing

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) and Economic Policy Institute (EPI) held a conference call to discuss their joint study that examines family income inequality on state and national levels. Elizabeth McNichol, senior fellow at CBPP, said that the gap between the richest families and the middle and poorest families is widening. She said the long standing trend in the growing inequality gap has accelerated since the late 1990s. The study is based on inflation-adjusted Census data, and McNichol said incomes fell for poor families, stagnated for middle income families, and climbed by nine percent for the nation’s richest families.

The conference call focused on the findings for Alabama, which McNichol said had the second largest divide between the richest and poorest families, the first being New York. She said the “nation’s current economic problems highlight the need to address the problem of growing inequality” and that it is “fundamentally unfair when all those who contribute to economic growth do not receive a share of that growth.”

Kimble Forrister, state coordinator at Alabama Arise, said that federal policy in the last few years created “hyper growth” for the richest families, and that Alabama’s state policies and tax systems didn’t help the situation. He said two proposals he would point to for relieving the gap would be changing the tax system by lowering the tax on groceries and expanding deductions, and also supporting a pilot program which offers a “promising path to workforce training for workers making under 40,000 dollars.”