Quintile Income Inequality

Income Inequality and the Lowest Quintile Income inequality is often associated with negative things such as decreased quality of life and a lack of social mobility. Yet, the lower classes are receiving less and less of the United States’ overall income while the top earners' share is increasing. Why? This paper will explore causes of the growing income inequality as well as possible solutions to slowing it down.
The income inequality gap has been growing over the past few decades, according to a study done by K. A. Bryan and L. Martinez. They not only recognize that the gap has been growing, but that lower income groups haven’t had a significant increase in inequality since the 1980s. Therefore, while their income has been growing minimally,
Factors such as corruption, unemployment, and education level? This study by Apergis, Dincer, and Payne looks for the relationship between these factors and income inequality in the short run and the long run. they based his study off a previous study finding a positive relationship between poverty and income inequality. Meaning that the more poverty in an area, the higher the income inequality. Payne used annual data from 1980 to 2004 for every state in the US. This study used data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics. They then performed a statistical t-test for every factor’s significance in determining poverty and income inequality. They found a significant impact on income inequality from the unemployment rate, level of education, real per capita personal income, and poverty. However, corruption was deemed to have an insignificant relationship with income inequality. This paper argues that instead of fighting income inequality, it would be more beneficial to fight poverty, therefore creating less income inequality.
Here are a few definitions used in this paper. When referring to the lower quintile of income earners or households, it means the lowest income earning 20% of tax filers. The top quintile subsequently, refers to the top income earning 20% of tax filers. Outsourcing is to obtain goods or a service from an outside
So, during the previous election cycle, proposed health care and tax policies were often examined in classes. We spent most of our time talking about how the upper classes continue to grow rapidly, leaving the lower classes in the dust. However, we never really looked into why the lower classes weren’t growing as quickly. It was implied the reasons for their lack of growth were similar to the reasons behind their lack of class mobility or rooted in wealth inequality. I struggled the most in this paper with finding research that had more findings than lower quintile workers earned more in the seventies than in present day. A lot of papers just reaffirmed that finding in a different way. Although most of the papers brought up that point, that was also what I found most interesting about the topic because I hadn’t known that until researching this topic. I hope to learn more about less conservative tax policies and their effect on inequality since most of the papers I read focused on either the Bush tax cuts or the Reagan tax