New Report: Washington’s Wealthiest ‘Rake It In’
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April 9, 2008
Seattle, WA – It's no surprise, but now it's documented in black and white: The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. It's happening in Washington as well as the rest of the country.
A new report on "income inequality" says wages of the lowest-income families in the state have lost ground since the late 1990s, while the richest in Washington have made about 12 percent more money.
Marilyn Watkins, of the Economic Opportunity Institute, says with another recession looming, lessons are still to be learned from the last one.
"This really does point to the failure of national policies over the last eight years. It took us a long time to start recovering from the recession of 2001. The benefits of that recovery really went disproportionately to the wealthy and were not broadly shared by most working Americans."
Middle-class Washington family income has grown by only 2.5 percent in the past decade, when adjusted for inflation. Watkins warns that's not enough to weather an economic downturn. She believes one of the state's priorities should be expanding unemployment benefits, after the rules were changed in 2003 to make it harder to qualify.
"We went from 50 percent of people qualifying for unemployment insurance when the last recession hit us, to now, when less than a third of people who are unemployed qualify. That's certainly something we need our state legislators to address when they come back to Olympia in January."
Another report finding states the richest 5 percent of families in Washington make about 11 times as much as the poorest 20 percent.
And although state governments are somewhat limited in what they can do about these income gaps, the report's authors suggest that states could make their taxes more progressive, and do more to help families with health care, child care and job training.
"Pulling Apart: A State-by-State Analysis of Income Trends" is a joint effort of the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities. It's available online at www.cbpp.org.