Overshadowed by last week’s Congressional Budget Office report on the soaring incomes of America’s wealthy was another federal study measuring income inequality at the state level–and it found Connecticut among seven states where the inequality is higher than in the country as a whole by all three standards applied (.pdf).
Based on data from five years of the American Community Survey, the Census Bureau looked at income distribution using three measurements: the Gini index, which ranges from 0.0, when all households have equal shares of income, to 1.0, when one household has all the income and the rest none; the ratio of household income at the 90th percentile to that at the 10th; and the ratio of household income at the 95th percentile to that at the 20th.
Only seven states–Connecticut, New York, Connecticut, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, and California–and the District of Columbia had income inequality higher than the nation’s by all three measurements. On the other end of the scale, 32 states had inequality levels lower than the country by all three standards.
