CNN Names Wyoming Town Most Unequal Place In America
In terms of income inequality, when you have a city that has both exorbitantly rich citizens and those barely scraping to get by, what town do you think of? Is it Los Angeles? New York City? Well, a recent article by CNN names Jackson, Wyoming as the most unequal place in America.
The article uses the information from a report by a the Economic Policy Institute in which the organization analyzed data to find out how economic changes from 1915 - 2015 have affected the top 1% in relation to the rest of the country.
"In 2015, the top 1 percent of families in the U.S. earned, on average, 26.3 times as much income as the bottom 99 percent — an increase from 2013, when they earned 25.3 times as much," the report says.
But in Jackson, Wyoming, that number is much higher and the gap is wider than anywhere else in the country, with the top 1% earning as much as 132 times more than the bottom 99%.
It's worth noting that, like many studies conducted with Wyoming as a factor, these statistics may be skewed by our relatively low population, and the fact that Jackson is the occasional home to many billionaires and celebrities.