Illustrating Oregon’s Defining Challenge

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Illustrating Oregon’s Defining Challenge

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Last December President Obama stated that income inequality is the “defining challenge of our time.” OCPP’s latest publications illustrate how this challenge manifests itself in Oregon.

Illustrating Oregon’s Defining Challenge

Last December President Obama stated that income inequality is the “defining challenge of our time.” OCPP’s latest publications illustrate how this challenge manifests itself in Oregon.

While some bad-mouth Oregon’s economy, the fact is that our state’s economy has performed exceptionally well by some key measures. A new OCPP fact sheet, If Economic Growth Assured Well-Being, Oregonians Would be Thriving, presents charts showing that Oregon’s economy has significantly outpaced the U.S. economy and that our economic growth has topped that of all but one other state. We’re a larger share of the national economy than years ago. And Oregon’s growth in worker productivity is tops in the nation.

Yet those gains have not been widely shared.

The charts in another just released fact sheet, Economic Gains Flow to the Top as Oregon Income Inequality Soars, show that the income of Oregon’s top 1 percent has soared, fueled by tremendous income growth among the 1,600 households that comprise the top one-tenth of1 percent. Meanwhile, the median income — the income of the typical Oregonian — has stagnated. The report also shows that almost three-quarters of all capital gains income goes to the top 1 percent, with the top one-tenth of 1 percent reaping almost one-half of all capital gains income.

The bottom line: Oregon’s main economic problem is not the lack of economic growth, but rather the fact that the gains of Oregon’s s economic growth are flowing primarily to the relative few at the top. Oregon’s defining challenge is to adopt the policies that will generate broadly shared prosperity.

 


This post was originally published on www.blueoregon.com on April 30, 2014. The original post can be found at http://www.blueoregon.com/2014/04/illustrating-oregons-defining-challenge/.

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OCPP

Written by staff at the Oregon Center for Public Policy.
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Chuck Sheketoff

Chuck Sheketoff is a founder of the Oregon Center for Public Policy and former Executive Director. Incorporated in 1995, the Center was launched with Chuck as its first executive director after Chuck received the "public interest pioneer award" from the Stern Family Fund in September, 1997. Prior to starting the Center, Chuck lobbied the Oregon legislature on tax policies and on human services programs' policies and budgets on behalf of legal aid clients (1992 to 1996) and the low-income clients of the Oregon Law Center (1997).

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