By CAP Action War Room

America’s Disturbing And Pervasive Inequality, In Three Charts

The Census Bureau’s latest estimates of income and poverty released Tuesday reveal that, despite the economic recovery, inequality remains a massive problem in the United States. We’ve assembled three charts that demonstrate the how deeply the problem runs in our society:

1. Income inequality. Five years of economic recovery hasn’t resulted in any income growth for the vast majority of Americans. In 2013, the median income nationwide was $51,900, essentially unchanged from a year before and 8 percent lower than the median income in 2007, the year before the recession hit. The top five percent of earners made more than $196,000, while the bottom 10 percent made less than $12,400.

2. Racial inequality. Black and Hispanic Americans continue to lag far behind non-Hispanic white and Asian households in the amount that they ear. The median household headed by a black person earned $34,600 in 2013 and the median household headed by a Hispanic person earned $41,000. That’s compared to $58,300 for the median white, non-Hispanic household and $67,100 for the median Asian household.

3. Gender inequality. We wrote yesterday about how the gender wage gap hasn’t budged from last year: women earn just 78 cents for every dollar a man earns. But the poverty rate is higher for women than it is for men as well. The Census found that 15.8 percent of women live in poverty, compared to 13.1 percent of men. And as the chart below demonstrates, the poverty gap between men and women grows as the population ages.

CREDIT: U.S. Census Bureau

BOTTOM LINE: Five years into the economic recovery, middle class Americans are still struggling to make ends meet. But there is no reason to expect the economy to really hum again and inequality to decrease unless we take action to address the problems. That means supporting policies like these that help working families, not the rich, and that grow the economy from the middle-out, not the top-down.

The EPA is asking the public for input on ways to improve its Risk Management Program.

Join me and tell the EPA we need safety to be a requirement for chemical facilities today.

110 million. That’s how many Americans live in high-risk zones near chemical facilities.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is doing invaluable work to make the markets for credit cards, mortgages and other financial products and services fairer and more transparent. And once again, the financial industry is going all-out to block those efforts.

The industry’s latest threat involves a proposal to make the CFPB’s complaint system more useful and user-friendly by giving consumers the right to include the specifics of their complaints in a searchable public database.

Please join us in telling the CFPB: Don’t back down from your proposal to let consumers share their stories publicly.

Hundreds of thousands of people have used the CFPB’s complaint system, and more than 30,000 cases have already resulted in monetary relief. Complaint data also helps the CFPB detect and respond to broader patterns of industry error or misconduct. The complaint system could be far more valuable, though, if consumers had the option of publicly describing their bad experiences. That way, consumers would be able to learn about the experiences of others and make more informed choices, and financial companies would have an added incentive to compete by actually trying to satisfy their customers, not by trying to put something over on them.

But financial companies, just as they fought the creation of the CFPB in the first place, are fighting its complaint proposal tooth and nail – through the press, through lobbying, and through a highly deceptive advertising campaign in which the industry falsely claims that businesses would not have an equal right to post their responses.

That’s why we need to fight back.  Urge the CFPB to stand firm and help consumers share their experiences and hold big banks accountable.

Speak up today, because the big banks are working feverishly hard to take away our chance to speak up in the future.

Thank you for your continued support for real financial reform.

Sincerely,

Lisa Donner
Executive Director
Americans for Financial Reform

It’s pretty common these days to hear my friends and family members complaining about global warming—but it’s not just the weather they’re complaining about any more. One friend had to evacuate her town with her small boys in tow to flea this season’s wildfires. Another had to abandon a coastal cottage that had been in his family for generations because of rising sea levels. A grandparent stranded in a heat wave. Global warming is affecting all of us every day. And unless we take immediate action, both to help communities prepare for the consequences but also to reduce climate emissions, these stories will become more frequent, and more dire. —Karla

UCS reports highlight global warming consequences for American West.
Two new reports from UCS experts demonstrate just how serious the climate risks are for the great American West and the people who live there. Hotter, drier conditions brought on by global warming are contributing to more large wildfires and longer wildfire seasons. And in the Rocky Mountains—home to Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Glacier National Parks—these conditions are having severe impacts on the region’s forests—as drought, wildfires, and tree-killing insects that thrive in hotter temperatures are producing potentially irreversible effects. READ MORE

Ask a Scientist

“My husband and I live in the American Southwest and are very concerned about its habitability in the future due to worsening drought and rising temperatures. We are especially concerned about where our children and grandchildren will be able to live and prosper. Are there any regions of the country that might emerge unscathed from the effects of climate change?”—J. Winkeller, Gilbert, AZ.

I empathize. Climate change is now part of everyday reality, and no place in the United States—or the rest of the world, for that matter—is unaffected. Even if we were able to completely switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources right now, the climate will continue to warm in the coming decades. The National Climate Assessment recently examined the current and projected impacts of climate change on different regions of the country. READ MORE

Science in Action
	Protect Rocky Mountain forests before it’s too late!If we do not act now, the forests of the Rocky Mountains will continue to die as they face the severe consequences of climate change. Urge your elected officials to allocate the resources necessary for forest managers to address the current effects of global warming and implement steps that can make our forests more resilient.