This information is Courtesy of the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. I hope it will be helpful and useful in making your arguments against poverty and inequality.
1. Wage Inequality. Over the last 30 years, wage inequality in the United States has increased substantially, with the overall level of inequality now approaching the extreme level that prevailed prior to the Great Depression.
2. CEO pay CEOs in 1965 made 24 times more than the average production worker, whereas in 2009 they made 185 times more.
3. Homelessness. There are 750,000 Americans who are homeless on any given night, with one in five of them considered chronically homeless. The ranks of the sheltered homeless include disproportionate numbers of males, blacks, middle-aged people (i.e., ages 31-50), veterans, and disabled.
4. Education Wage Premium. Only college graduates have experienced growth in median weekly earnings since 1979 (in real terms). High school dropouts have, by contrast, seen their real median weekly earnings decline by about 22 percent.
5. Gender Pay Gaps. Throughout much of the 20th century, the average woman earned about 60% of what the average man earned. Starting in the late 1970s, there was a substantial increase in women’s relative earnings, with women coming to earn about 80% of what men earned. This rise plateaued in 2005 and, since then, and has remained roughly unchanged.
6. Occupational Sex Segregation. Women and men tend to work in very different occupations. And overall “men’s jobs” are better paid than “women’s jobs.”
7. Racial Gaps in Education. High-school dropout rates are least among whites and highest among Hispanics, while college enrollment rates are least among blacks and highest among whites.
8. Racial Discrimination. Racial discrimination continues to be in the labor market. An experiment carried out in Chicago and Boston during 2001 and 2002 shows that resumes with “white-sounding” names, whether male or female, were much more likely to result in call backs for interviews than were those with “black-sounding” names (even though the resumes were otherwise identical).
9. Child Poverty. In the United States, 21.9 percent of all children are in poverty, a poverty rate second only to that of Mexico’s (among rich nations).
10. Residential Segregation. The rich in the United States tend not to live in the same neighborhoods as the poor. Such residential segregation is on the rise.
11. Health Insurance. In 2007, 8.1 million children under 18 years old were without health insurance. Children in poverty and Hispanic children were more likely to be uninsured.
12. Intragenerational Income Mobility. Intragenerational income mobility refers to the rate at which a person moves to a higher or lower income level during her or his work career. More than half of those individuals in the bottom income quintile in 1994 remained there 10 years later, and less than 4 percent reached the top quintile.
13. Bad Jobs. “Bad jobs” are typically considered those that pay low wages and do not include access to health insurance and pension benefits. About 10% of full-time workers are in low-wage jobs, about 30% don't have health insurance, and about 40% don't have pensions. The likelihood of being in a bad job is much worse for part-time workers, for on-call and day laborers, and for those working for temporary help agencies.
14. Discouraged Workers. Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe that there are no jobs available for them. The number of discouraged workers in the U.S. increased sharply during the current recession, rising to 717,000 in the first quarter of 2009, a 70-percent increase from the first quarter of 2008. Relative to their share of the labor force, young people, blacks, and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics and men were over-represented among discouraged workers.
15. Wealth Inequality. The top 10% of households controlled 68.2 percent of the total wealth in 1983 and 73.1% of the total wealth in 2007.
16. Intergenerational Income Mobility. Intergenerational income mobility can be measured by calculating the rate at which individuals move to income quintiles that are different that that of their families of origin. The proportion of sons who remained in the bottom quartile declined between 1961 and 1972 and stayed the same afterward.
17. Deregulation of the Labor Market. The percentage of all wage and salary workers who are union members has declined from 24% in 1973 to 12.4% in 2008. The decline in the private sector was steeper than the decline in the public sector. At the same time as union membership declined, the real value of the minimum wage also fell by 25% in the 1980s, leading to a weakening influence of the minimum wage on the low-wage labor market. These two developments in combination may be understood as the foundation of the newly “deregulated” U.S. labor market.
18. Job Losses. Employment fell by 3.1 million jobs during 2008. The job losses were more widespread and severe than during the previous two recessions in 1990-1991 and 2001 and in fact the fall in employment is comparable to that in the deeper recession of 1981-1982.
19. Immigrants and Inequality. Immigrants to the U.S. today are concentrated in both areas of highly-skilled workers and unskilled workers in the labor force.
20. Productivity and Real Income. We are a richer country overall because of a spectacular rise in labor productivity. Although the growth of labor productivity has expanded total national income, the real income and wages of the median worker have at the same time stagnated.
A summary of the details:
40% of US households make below $36,000
60% make below $57,000
80% make below $91,750
95% making below $165k
98% making less than $250,000
99.99% make less than $5 million and 0.01% make more than $5 million (with a very special category for those making over $1.5 billion: "Hedge Fund Managers")
1% of society makes 17.3% of the income,
The average income in the top 0.01%, or 11,000 households, is $35,473,200, and a minimum of $8,579,000
The average income in the the next 99,000 households, or 99.9%-99.99% of the population makes an average $4,699,500, and a minimum of $1,532,400
The average income in the next 451,000 households, or 99.5%-99.9% of the population makes and average $1,206,200, and a minimum of $482,400
The average income in the next 564,000 households, or 99%-99.5% of the population makes and average $269,800, and a minimum of $126,300