Asset Building: Discussion with Indi Dutta-Gupta on Income Inequality

Asset Building: Discussion with Indi Dutta-Gupta on Income Inequality

Economists claim America is two years past the worst recession since the Great Depression, but the slow recovery has continued to sow widespread hardship. The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and a flurry of new data are calling attention to the pervasive poverty and growing inequality that are markers of the post-recession economy.

To make sense of what this data tells us about how families are really doing post-recession and how we might design more effective public policies, the New America Foundation convened a panel of experts to weigh in with their take.

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. Additionally, rising income inequality has created a divergence in life expectancy for people at opposite ends of the income spectrum. Progressive taxation, support for worker benefits, and expanding health care access are among the strategies Dutta-Gupta looks to for decreasing income inequality.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• income
• inequality
• asset
• building
• economics
• economy
• poverty
• wealth
• finance
• financial
• planning
• retirement
• savings
• labor