U.S. Income Inequality Has Been Flat Since 1994

Great post by Mark Perry of "Carpe Diem."

We keep hearing from the media and OWS protestors that rising income inequality (or exploding income inequality according to Jonathan Chait) and stagnating household incomes have gotten worse in recent years, caused allegedly by the "rich getting richer at the expense of the poor and lower-income income groups" because disproportionate and rising shares of national income have been going to the top 1% or top 20%, etc. In other words, we're hearing the standard, typical "class warfare" narratives.



Another part of that narrative is that income inequality wasn't nearly as much of a problem in the decades of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s when there was an upwardly mobile middle-class, when real median household income was rising year after year, and when income was more equitably and fairly distributed among income groups, i.e. during the "Golden Age" of the middle class. But once we experienced the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s and the first "decade of greed," the American Dream of middle class equality started to fade. Once the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 took effect, the middle class was doomed, and "the rich" dominated the economy, upward mobility was over, the share of income going to the rich skyrocketed and income inequality "exploded."

But there's a problem, because three different measures of income dispersion (the share of total U.S. income going to the top 20% of American households, and Gini coefficients for both U.S. households and families) from the Census Bureau (Tables E-1 and F-4) displayed in the two charts above show trends that are completely contrary to the common narrative.

As can be seen in the top chart, all three measures of income dispersion have gradually increased over time, but most of the increases occurred in the earlier period between 1967 and 1994. Starting in the mid-1990s, the three measures of income inequality stalled out and barely changed in the sixteen years from 1994 to 2010 (see bottom chart of just the 1994-2010 period).