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The One Minute Geographer: Connecticut’s Income Inequality
Connecticut is a good place to talk about bad subject: income inequality. Connecticut ranks second after New York state in household income inequality. A commonly used measure to gauge income inequality is the Gini coefficient that can range between 1.0 and 0. At the 1.0 extreme, one household gets all the money and all other households get nothing. At the 0 extreme, every household has identical income.
The Census Bureau tells us that Gini coefficient for Connecticut is .50 (New York’s is .51). We can see that this is a national issue, exaggerated in Connecticut, but common throughout the United States, because the US measure is .48 and the ‘best’ state, Utah is .43.
If you lived in Connecticut would you qualify to be among the 1% of top earners? Connecticut has the highest amount of income you must earn to qualify to be in the 1% — $827,000 annually. Of those in the top 1% income bracket, their average income is $3.1 million. Those folks pay about $826,600 annually in federal income taxes. (That’s a 27% tax rate.) All three figures mentioned in this paragraph are the highest among the fifty states in 2020.
In general the places in the US with the most income inequality tend to be large urban areas, and the New York City-Northern New Jersey-Southwest Connecticut region is home to some of the…
