Intelligencer, September 14, Study: Inequality Robs $2.5 Trillion From U.S. Workers Each Year
America continues to struggle with income inequality, and if it were distributed more evenly over the past five decades, the average full-time workers could be making approximately $40,000-50,000 more a year in annual salary.
In the present moment of booming stock markets and child hunger, you might be feeling too inured to America’s grotesque levels of inequality to summon much interest in yet another report testifying to the one percent’s total victory in the 50 Years Class War.
But a new study from the Rand Corporation, in partnership with the Fair Work Center, illustrates the impact of a half-century of upward redistribution in bracingly concrete terms: If income had been distributed as evenly over the past five decades as it was in 1975, the median full-time worker in the U.S. would enjoy annual earnings of roughly $92,000 a year. As is, that worker makes just $50,000.
