High Five for Sheboygan!

From The Daily by Benjamin Carlson:

SHEBOYGAN, WIS. — In a lakefront town perhaps best known for its jaunty name and mouth-watering smoked bratwursts, there’s a new claim to fame: the most equal city in America.

According to the latest statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, the city and suburbs of Sheboygan, Wis., have the smallest gap between the rich and poor of any metropolitan area in the United States.

While Occupy Wall Street protesters rail against the runaway wealth of the upper crust, here the top 5 percent take home a much smaller proportion of the region’s wealth (16 percent) than in the U.S. at large (22 percent). To talk hard numbers, the top 20 percent of Sheboygan County makes a median income of $127,440, while the general workforce makes around $50,000.

In fact, the city’s Gini score — a measure of income inequality on a scale from 0 to 100, with bigger wealth gaps measuring higher on the scale — is 39, lying closer to Canada’s figure (32) than that of the U.S. as a whole (47).

Residents say the city reminds them of how America used to be, when there was no such thing as a “middle-class crisis.”