Primary Snapshots: The Golden State of Inequality
California’s economy is booming, but the state’s poorest residents are falling further and further behind.
February 28, 2020
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Why is Robert Reich so stressed out?
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California’s economy is booming, but the state’s poorest residents are falling further and further behind.
Calvin Wongus has had no trouble finding employment in the tight labor market. But for the poorest workers like himself, the jobs have been low-paying and part-time.
Poorest households see real incomes drop in 13 states, have slower growth than under Obama in 36 states.
Middle-income workers in Wisconsin are facing rising prices and reduced bargaining power.
48 states saw real median household income growth decline in Trump’s first two years, some dramatically.
Stagnant wages and increasingly unaffordable housing costs are leaving many low-income residents behind.
The key primary state has experienced a sluggish recovery from the Great Recession.
The Silver State’s new workforce is younger and more likely to skew Democratic, but its members’ political affiliations remain opaque.
Sanders proposes to raise the national hourly minimum wage, make joining unions easier and to close gender pay gaps. He also promises to fix “a broken and racist criminal justice system.”
Early Democratic primary state voters seem in favor of more government regulation of Wall Street. But are all presidential candidates listening?
On debate stages and in selfie lines, Elizabeth Warren has been offering herself to voters as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ideological heir.
Baby boomers are criticized by younger, debt-burdened Americans frustrated by economic inequality. But many boomers are also hurting.
A growing body of research indicates that many of the solutions to the climate crisis and economic inequality are the same.
Test your knowledge about Wall Street’s favorite alternative investment class.
For the full story read Mark Kreidler’s “Industry Seeks to Flatline Universal Health Care.”
“Our administration will look like America,” the presidential contender tells Capital & Main. “We have got to undo the racism and xenophobia of the Trump administration.”
Ahead of Thursday’s Democratic debates, Golden State native Manuel Pastor offers a primer for the presidential hopefuls.
Test your knowledge about inequities in the nation’s most populous state.
A deeply funded lobbying group led by a former Hillary Clinton aide is out to kill Medicare for All. Its ideological roots run back to the Truman era.
An anti-immigrant law made Tony Valdovinos miserable, but he didn’t leave Arizona. Instead, he knocked on doors.
In this swing state, Phoenix’s Maricopa County will be the battleground within the battleground.
Test your knowledge about inequities in America’s health care system.
Measuring the shame of America’s “best economy ever.”
Surveys reveal that Americans have a very distorted sense of how unequal the country is. Try your luck at these questions about how our economy distributes wealth and income. No matter your score, you’ll be able to sign up for our newsletter so you can keep tabs on the United States of Inequality.
Progressives are going all-out to reverse the notion that Florida is unassailable Trump country.
Post-WWII reforms like the New Deal and the ensuing consolidation of the labor movement increased income equality in the U.S., but the playing field started to tilt in the 1970s due to the forces of globalization and pro-corporate government policies that hurt the working class.
A French economist finds that America’s tax structure lies at the heart of inequality.
How changes to California’s Proposition 13 could reduce inequality.
The Democratic frontrunner’s mixed economic record leaves him vulnerable to progressive opponents.
A struggling bellwether county in Pennsylvania appears to be back in the Democratic column. But is it?
Co-published by Fast Company
Many economists say the president can’t claim credit for the current economy and that his policies have contributed to rising inequality.
Co-published by The Guardian
Months after the federal shutdown, a Detroit childcare worker still struggles to make up for lost pay.
Today we embark on a yearlong project exploring what has become another “inconvenient truth” – the pain that economic inequality has brought to America.
Co-published by The Guardian and Fast Company
A crop of presidential candidates is pushing proposals aimed at Americans who work hard but feel they’re not getting their share of the pie.
An estimated 41.4 percent of the total U.S. population — 135 million people — are either poor or low-income.
Here’s what former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who narrated this video on the series, has said about the project: “It’s so important for fact-based news outlets to shine a light on the defining issue of our time. ‘United States of Inequality’ is a timely reporting project.”
Capital & Main’s special series, The United States of Inequality, will feature articles, interviews, videos and infographics weekly till the 2020 elections. Sign up to be the first to get the content as it is being published.
An estimated 41.4 percent of the total U.S. population — 135 million people — are either poor or low-income.
One in four African-American families have a net worth of zero or less.
The median white family has 41 times more wealth than the median black family and 22
times more wealth than the median Latino family.
CEO compensation has grown 940 percent since 1978, while typical worker compensation has risen only 12 percent during that time.
More than 30 percent of black children and over 26 percent of Hispanic kids live in poverty.
The top 0.1 percent’s earnings grew 15 times faster than the bottom 90 percent’s earnings between 1979 and 2017.
Three men own as much as the bottom half of Americans.
The richest five percent of Americans own 66 percent of the nation’s wealth.
The richest one percent own more than half of stocks.
U.S. men have three times more than women in retirement savings.
Today – exactly one year before the 2020 presidential election – Capital & Main is launching a 12-month series on economic inequality in America. “United States of Inequality: 2020 and the Great Divide” will examine how tens of millions of Americans increasingly struggle to make ends meet, and how this reality will affect one of the most consequential elections in America’s history.
Conceived by Capital & Main and produced in partnership with the Guardian US, Fast Company and The American Prospect, “United States of Inequality” will feature at least one story or multimedia feature every week for 52 weeks through the November 2020 election.
Here’s what former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who narrated this video on the series, has said about the project: “It’s so important for fact-based news outlets to shine a light on the defining issue of our time. ‘United States of Inequality’ is a timely reporting project.”
The series content will fall into the following five thematic areas:
We hope you will follow “United States of Inequality” in the weeks and months to come as the nation grapples with an issue that will shape the 2020 election in profound ways — and that ranks as the other inconvenient truth of our era.
Capital & Main is an award-winning nonprofit publication that reports from California on the most pressing economic, environmental and social issues of our time. Winner of the 2016 Online Journalist of the Year prize from the Southern California Journalism Awards and a 2017 Best in the West award, Capital & Main has had stories co-published in more than 30 media outlets, from The Atlantic, Time, Reuters, The Guardian and Fast Company to The American Prospect, Grist, Slate and the Daily Beast. Working with top writers, editors and visual artists, we cover income inequality, climate change, the green economy, housing, health care, public education, immigration, race, and criminal justice. Capital & Main is a 501(c)3 tax exempt organization.
