Census: Income inequality at highest since tracking began

WASHINGTON — Last year, income inequality in the United States reached its highest level since the Census Bureau started tracking it in 1967, according to federal data released Thursday.

In the midst of the longest economic expansion the United States has ever seen, with poverty and unemployment rates at historic lows, the separation between rich and poor from 2017 and 2018 was greater than it has ever been, federal data show.

Nine states saw spikes in that divide: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Kansas, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Texas and Virginia.

The gulf is starkest in wealthy coastal areas such as Washington, D.C., New York, Connecticut and California, as well as in areas with widespread poverty, such as Puerto Rico and Louisiana. Equality was highest in Utah, Alaska and Iowa.

The Gini index measures wealth distribution, with zero representing total equality and 1 representing total inequality, where all wealth is concentrated in a single household. The indicator has been rising steadily during the past several decades. When the Census Bureau began studying income inequality more than 50 years ago, the Gini index was 0.397. In 2018, the Gini index rose from 0.482 to 0.485.

By comparison, no European country had a Gini index greater than 0.38 between 2017 and 2018.

Recent economic gains by lower-income workers who have found jobs and benefited from minimumwage increases in many states hasn’t made up for the long-running trend of the wealthy seeing most of the income growth.