# Inequality is real, it's personal, it's expensive and it was created

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Visit http://inequality.is/

Inequality is real, it's personal, it's expensive and it was created. Today, 1% of Americans are taking home nearly 20% of the country's total income and own nearly 35% of the country's wealth. This didn't happen by accident. As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich explains, we allowed it to happen.

We can't have a prosperous economy without a strong and prosperous middle class. Inequality can be fixed. So, let's fix it.

inequality.is, a new interactive site from the Economic Policy Institute, explains the causes of and solutions to income inequality.

The recent past has seen greater economic inequality in America than at any time since the Great Depression.

In the three decades after World War II American incomes grew quickly and equally, but starting in the late 1970s things began to change.

Today, 1% of Americans are taking home nearly 20 percent of the country's total income, and own more than 35% of America's wealth.

And it didn't happen by accident. It's the result of policy decisions on taxes, education, trade, labor, macroeconomics, and financial regulation -- all of which shifted economic power away from low and moderate-income American families.

Economic inequality is real, it's personal, it's expensive. And it was created.

Since the 1960s, tax rates on very high incomes have been slashed dramatically, starving public investments in schools and roads and everything else needed to build our…

- Kind: Short
- Year: 2013
- Runtime: 2 min
- By: Economic Policy Institute
- Archive: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Inequality_is_real,_it%27s_personal,_it%27s_expensive_and_it_was_created.webm)
- Licence or status: [CC BY 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0) (as the archive states it)
- Credit: Economic Policy Institute
- Who can watch: Teens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/commons/64513832?play=1)