Report: Conn. falling behind other states in disparity ranking

Posted: November 19, 2012 | Author: admin | Filed under: Income |Leave a comment »

Another report says the gap between Connecticut’s richest and poorest residents is growing. This one, by the advocacy groups Connecticut Association for Human Services and Connecticut Voices for Children looked at tax and census data over the last three decades. It says incomes at the top of the wealth spectrum have increased dramatically, while the bottom has hardly budged.

You can hear about the report here:
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Liz Dupont-Diehl of Connecticut Association for Human Services says Connecticut’s place is slipping nationally in this respect.

“So the gap between the very richest and very poorest quintiles, the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent, formerly was ranked 46th, and now is grown to the third worst. And that is since 1977.”

She says the top one percent in Connecticut now earns nearly 30 percent of all of the state’s adjusted gross income.

“The disparity is important because increasingly research is showing that the more unequal a society is, the lower the chance that people have the ability to attain mobility with their situation.”

The advocacy groups say the negative effects of inequality should be mitigated by raising the minimum wage and indexing it to keep up with inflation, making sure the state’s unemployment insurance system is solvent, making the tax code more progressive and strengthening Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

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