Desigualdade - discusssão atual

The income gap narrowed in the U.S. between the Great Depression and the 1970s. Since then, it has widened. From 1979 to 2011, inflation-adjusted after-tax income for the top 1 percent of households grew 200 percent; for the bottom fifth it rose 48 percent. The top 1 percent of earners took home 95 percent of the gains in the first three years of the recovery from the 2008 recession. By 2013, the Fed found that the lower half of U.S. households by wealth held 1 percent of the total while the wealthiest 5 percent held 63 percent. (Economists quarrel about the data, though not about the direction of the trend.) The CIA World Fact Book ranks the U.S. 43rd of 144 countries listed in order of unequal family income distribution, with Slovenia the most equal and Lesotho the least. Equality and prosperity can also diverge. While U.S. incomes were spreading out, poverty rates were falling. New York City has the biggest rich-poor gap in the country, but its poverty rate is roughly half of Detroit’s. China’s income gap has grown wider than America’s even as hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty. The top 1 percent’s share of income has fallen since 2005 in Spain and Norway as one struggled and the other prospered.
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