From ThinkProgress.org
As ThinkProgress has repeatedly noted, crucial services and public investments for Main Street America are being gutted as taxes on the richest Americans are the lowest they’ve been in a generation. Yet many Americans may not know exactly how unfair this is, as the country has grown increasingly unequal at the same time. Using data from the CIA Factbook based on the Gini coefficient — a measure of income inequality within a society — ThinkProgress has assembled the following graph, which demonstrates that the United States is now about as economically unequal as Uganda and more unequal than countries like Pakistan or the Ivory Coast:
Income inequality in the United States is actually higher than at any other time in modern history since the Great Depression. There is also a tremendous amount of inequality even in life expectancy, with the American Human Development Index reporting in 2010 that there is now a 6 year gap in average life expectancy between Mississippi, in the Deep South, and Connecticut, in prosperous New England.” As ThinkProgress previously reported, one of the major factors in this hike in income inequality has been the decline of unionization in America.
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We have gone from a First World country to a Third World one. Thank you Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Clinton and NAFTA must take some responsibility too.