How are Families Really Doing? Part 4: Income Inequality

This is the fourth and final installment in a series of interviews with policy experts who participated in an event we hosted on November 22nd, “Poverty, Inequality, Mobility, Oh My,” where we explored different ways of assessing how families are doing post-Great Recession and how applying these different approaches to the design of public policies might improve the conditions and opportunities of low-income families.

In this interview, Indi Dutta-Gupta from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities discusses the dynamics of inequality. Income inequality, he argues, damages our democracy by making our political process less representative of and less responsive to the needs of people on the low-end of the income spectrum and has even created a divergence in life expectancy. Progressive taxation, support for worker benefits, and expanding health care access are among the strategies Indi looks to for decreasing income inequality.

In addition to Indi’s presentation, you can find more from the Center on inequality in their new report “A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality” and a series of posts from their Off the Charts blog.