Meeting Date: May 9, 2014
Air Date: May 12, 2014
Eugene’s citizens have responded to the Occupy movement and homeless campers with attitudes that range from compassion and active support to outright disdain. But people who have a home and a job may not stop to think about how inequality affects society as a whole. City Club members will have that opportunity when Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Cay Johnston talks about the broader societal effects of inequality.
Adjusting for inflation, today’s income of most Americans is at the 1966 level. From 2009 to 2011, however, the recovery from the Great Recession was excessively profitable for the top 1 percent while the bottom 99 percent saw their income fall.
Few Americans understand the issue of inequality as well as Johnston. His 2001 Pulitzer Prize for reporting for The New York Times cited his “penetrating and enterprising reporting that exposed loopholes and inequities in the U.S. tax code, which was instrumental in bringing about reforms.”
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