Since September, the Occupy Wall Street protests has focused greater attention on America's huge wealth gap between the rich and everyone else. But what does income inequality actually look like?
This gulf has manifested itself in a variety of ways, including the CEO-to-worker pay ratio, and the huge difference in income growth between the wealthiest and poorest Americans. The infographic below, courtesy of data visualization site visual.ly, illustrates the different forms of inequality.
And with nearly three-quarters of Americans saying income inequality is a problem facing the country, according to a recent poll, it may be worth taking a closer look. In one example, the incomes of the top one percent of American earners have grown 275 percent between 1979 and 2007, while the the bottom fifth of earners have only seen their incomes rise 20 percent during the same period, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The high rates of compensation for CEOs of major corporations have also irked those concerned with income inequality. While the majority of shareholders recently voted that CEO compensation is correct, the infographic shows that if you split just 15 percent of Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers total compensation among workers, each of the company's employees would receive $144 additional dollars.
Here is the infographic "Inequality in America" from visual.ly: