Tamara Draut

And the gap grows…

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute released a new study yesterday finding that the giant chasm between the haves and the have-nots continues to grow in America. And while everyone lost when the tech bubble burst, early indications are that inequality began growing again in 2003, according to the study.

As America's top earners pull away from the bottom and the middle, we all suffer the consequences. As my colleague, Jim Lardner, writes in Inequality Matters, a book he co-edited, "National tragedies do not have to be sudden. [Rising inequality] has changed America in profound ways, by slow degrees. It has been going on for nearly three decades, so far without a presidential statement or a lead story on the evening news, to say nothing of a claim of responsibility."

Not since the Gilded Age has America been so unequal. And its effects are everywhere, though not always obvious. Its poisonous consequences can be seen in the decline of our public schools, in the creation of the higher education debt-for-diploma system, in the priorities of our nation's leaders who too often legislate where the money leads them, and in the toiling of millions of families for whom working hard no longer means getting ahead. Inequality hurts us all. Yet the sting has not brought outrage, but instead a numbness and resignation that the powerful are unstoppable. And the problems, intractable.

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Posted at 7:23 AM, Jan 27, 2006 in Economic Opportunity
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