Rising Inequality the Direct Result of Policy Choices
by Pablo Ros | September 26, 2012
It’s a familiar scene: Congress deadlocks. Nothing happens. It’s not a good thing.
But after you read the latest edition of the Economic Policy Institute’s The State of Working America released this month, you may just want Congress to go home and stop making the wrong decisions. Because one of the striking conclusions the authors come to after sifting through volumes of data is that the rising inequality experienced in this country during the past 30 plus years is the direct result of congressional policy choices.
Those policy choices include lowering individual and corporate tax rates; deregulating industries; failing to maintain the value of the minimum wage; failing to protect the right of workers to obtain collective bargaining; and failing to prevent the crises like the housing bubble and its subsequent bursting.
These are some of the bad policy choices that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan stand behind. It’s not that the economy has failed to grow. On the contrary, national income has increased enough that if it were fairly distributed through fair tax policies, it would benefit us all. Instead, as the top 1 percent has seen its fortunes grow by 156 percent since 1979, the wages of the bottom 90 percent of Americans have only increased by 17 percent.
What’s worse, the last decade has been a “lost” decade for middle-income families, who earned less in 2010 than in 2000. This is despite an increase in productivity of more than 22 percent by 2010 compared with a decade earlier.
More work, less pay.
These policy choices are anathema to what AFSCME stands for. That is why we will continue to fight for middle-class families who seek better wages and living conditions, and we urge all our members to make the best vote for working families in this year’s elections.
The EPI is a nonprofit, non-partisan think tank created in 1986 to improve the conversation on economic policy by including the needs of low- and middle-income workers.
