San Francisco Chronicle

09/28/05

The gap between high-income and low-income Americans is widening, the ranks of the poor in California and nationwide are swelling, and middle-class workers have lost ground compared with the 1970s, several national and state studies show. A disturbing new picture of low- and middle-income family finances is emerging from U.S. Census studies and from analyses of census and other data by the California Budget Project, the Brookings Institution, UC Berkeley researchers and organizations studying specific demographic or geographic groups. 'The increase in inequality in income is a longtime trend, but the pressure on middle- and low-income workers is going up rapidly,' said Alice Rivlin, an economist at the Brookings Institution and vice chair of the Federal Reserve from 1996 to 1999. 'Especially if they live in an area where there are high housing and gas prices, like California'...

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/09/28/MNGF8EV3UL1.DTL


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp