Florida among the top 3 states with the most income inequality
Florida is one of three states in the nation with the biggest income gap between the very rich and everyone else.
In 2015, a family in the top 1 percent nationally had an average income of more than $1.3 million — or 26.3 times as much as the $50,107 average income for the bottom 99 percent.
That’s according to a new study of income inequality from the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington D.C.
But in New York, Florida and Connecticut, the top 1 percent made at least 35 times as much as the average for the rest of the population.
In Florida, the top 1 percent had an average income of $1.54 million, or 39.5 times as much as the $39,094 average income for the bottom 99 percent.
The disparity is so lopsided in part because average Florida wages for the bottom 99 percent are well below the national average. Only six states had average incomes for the bottom 99 percent lower than Florida’s: Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina and West Virginia.
In the Tampa Bay area, the top 1 percent had average incomes of about $1.1 million in 2015, or 30.4 times the $36,647 average income of the bottom 99 percent in the region.
Statewide, it took $417,587 to make the top 1 percent of income in 2015, and more than $12 million to be in the top .01 percent. On average Floridians in the top .01 percent had incomes exceeding $45.1 million a year.
Nationwide, the institute says, income inequality has risen in every state since the 1970s and in most since the Great Recession.
See the full study here.
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