RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Stalled Progress? Five Decades of Black-White and Rural-Urban Income Gaps
JF RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
FD Russell Sage Foundation
SP 115
OP 136
DO 10.7758/RSF.2025.11.2.06
VO 11
IS 2
A1 Hardy, Bradley L.
A1 Holla, Shria
A1 Krause, Elizabeth S.
A1 Ziliak, James P.
YR 2025
UL http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/11/2/115.abstract
AB We examine the contribution of the U.S. tax and social safety net to ameliorating racial and geographic household income gaps using nearly five decades of data from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement. Our results paint a mixed portrait of economic progress of Black and rural households relative to their White and urban counterparts over the last fifty years. The tax and transfer systems in any given year provide substantial redistribution to low-income Black and rural households, which has resulted in a narrowing of level gaps. However, those gaps have been exacerbated in the upper tail of the distribution, suggesting that the tax code does not undo the underlying economic forces pulling White and urban incomes apart from Black and rural households in the top half of the distribution. This is borne out in the stagnation of rank positional gaps across race and geography.