Note: In this early demo release of Rebalance, some calculations are quite rough or illustrative. The immediate goal is to give you a quick sense of what it can do. We will check the numbers more carefully and refine the models over time. We believe that it's critical that the numbers are as credible and transparent as possible.

About the inequality figures

Rebalance's main inequality indicator, the Income gapThe Income gap is the ratio of the average income per adult of the richest 10% of Americans to the average income per adult of the bottom half (bottom 50%). It counts income after all taxes and government benefits — including cash benefits, tax credits, and health coverage such as Medicare and Medicaid. A value of 9× means the top 10% get nine times as much income per person as the bottom half. A smaller number means less inequality. (Measured per adult; source: World Inequality Database.), uses the World Inequality Database's estimates of income after taxes and benefits. How sure are these numbers? Measuring inequality takes assumptions — for example, how much income goes unreported, and how to divide the value of government services and health benefits among people. Our main source, the World Inequality Database (built by economists at the Paris School of Economics and UC Berkeley), finds a large rise in US inequality since 1980, even after taxes and benefits. Other researchers, notably Gerald Auten and David Splinter, economists at the Treasury and Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation, find a much smaller rise after taxes and benefits. The Congressional Budget Office's estimates fall in between, closer to the World Inequality Database. Most economists accept that inequality rose; the dispute is over how much. We will compare our policy estimates against the Congressional Budget Office's distribution tables as we refine the models.

Sources