As ThinkProgress has reported, American income inequality has skyrocketed over the last three decades. The wealthiest Americans have captured a large share of the nation’s economic prosperity, and their incomes continue to rise even as middle class wages remain stagnant. This income inequality has serious repercussions for the middle class, jeopardizing their economic ability and their political power.

But it doesn’t just affect people who are currently in the workforce. It has also contributed to a growing education gap that is affecting low- and middle-income children, according to a Center for American Progress report on income inequality and the middle class. The lowest-achieving students from high-income backgrounds are more likely to obtain a college education than the highest achieving students from low-income backgrounds, the report showed:

Perhaps most stunningly, there is evidence that low-income children who demonstrate aptitude for postsecondary education do not have the same access as children from higher-income backgrounds. The U.S. Department of Education reports that the probability that a top-scoring low-income student completes college is about the same as the probability that a low-scoring high-income student does, while the probability that a top-scoring middle-income student completes college is about as likely as a middle-scoring high-income student.

As income inequality continues to increase, the gap in educational attainment is growing too. The achievement gap between high- and low-income students is 30 to 40 percent larger than it was a generation ago, according to the paper, and income inequality is the primary reason. Areas of the country in which the middle class makes a higher share of income, meanwhile, demonstrate higher scores on achievement tests.

These problems lead to cycles of inequality that persist through generations. As Alan Krueger, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, notes, the future economic mobility of American children is more closely tied to their parents’ income than it is in any other developed country. That means that rising income inequality, and the growing education gap it leads to, is jeopardizing the future for millions of American children before they even have a chance to change it.

As of today — which is Equal Pay Day 2012 — women make 77 cents for every dollar that men earn. Over the course of a woman’s career, that disparity adds up to more than $430,000 in lost wages for an individual woman. As Center for American Progress economic analyst Matt Separa noted, the pay gap means that women fall behind economically in a number of ways:

Because of this gap women working full time are able to afford less education, housing, transportation, food, and health care for themselves and their families than their male counterparts. As a result women and female-headed households are more likely to be in poverty and less likely to have health insurance. The pay gap translates into a significant economic disadvantage for women and their families, especially when nearly two-thirds (63.9 percent) of women are now either the primary breadwinner or a co-breadwinner, bringing home at least 25 percent of their family’s income.

With the money lost over her lifetime, a woman could feed a family of four for 37 years, pay for seven four-year degrees at a public university, or simply save the money for retirement, boosting her quality of life when she leaves the workforce:

For some women, of course, the pay gap is even worse. According to a report from the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, Latina women face a pay gap of 40 percent.

Thanks in large part to the Occupy Wall Street movement, the debilitating effects of income inequality have been hoisted into the national spotlight. But in addition to killing economic growth and economic mobility, income inequality also exacerbates political inequality.

Today, ThinkProgress spoke with MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, whose new book, Why Nations Fail (co-written by James Robinson), looks at the effect politics and policy have on economic growth and prosperity. Acemoglu said that he believes the most “pernicious” effect of income inequality is that it drains political power from lower- and middle-class Americans and allows the richest to then begin “changing the rules in their favor”:

I think there’s a lot of debate about the economic impact of income inequality. There’s literature on how greater inequality might slow economic growth because it creates a less conducive environment for consumer demand or credit. But at the end, my view, and that of our book with James Robinson, is that the more pernicious effect of economic inequality comes indirectly through its impact on political inequality. it’s a general pattern throughout history, and we see around today, that when economic inequality increases, the people who have become economically more powerful will often attempt to use that power in order to gain even more political power. And once they are able to monopolize political power, they will start using that for changing the rules in their favor. And that sort of political inequality is the real danger that’s facing the United States.

Watch it:

Acemoglu added that the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United and the growth in Super PAC spending are only going to make this problem worse by increasing the importance of money in politics. “We already had a very serious problem,” he said. “Instead of trying to stem that tide, we’ve done the opposite and we’ve now opened the sluice gate and said you can use that money with no restrictions whatsoever.” According to calculations by Council of Economic Advisers chairman Alan Kruegar, the shift in income inequality over the last three decades has been the equivalent of moving $1.1 trillion of income from the 99 percent to the top 1 percent every single year.

In 2010, as the nation slowly ground its way from Great Recession to recovery, 93 percent of national income gains went to the richest 1 percent of Americans. As Reuters’s David Cay Johnston pointed out today, this makes the 2010 recovery quite different from the recovery that followed the Great Depression, as then, income gains were widely shared by the population, not concentrated at the very top:

The 1934 economic rebound was widely shared, with strong income gains for the vast majority, the bottom 90 percent.

In 2010, we saw the opposite as the vast majority lost ground.

National income gained overall in 2010, but all of the gains were among the top 10 percent. Even within those 15.6 million households, the gains were extraordinarily concentrated among the super-rich, the top one percent of the top one percent.

Just 15,600 super-rich households pocketed an astonishing 37 percent of the entire national gain.

During the recovery, corporate profits have also roared back, already hitting their pre-recession heights. Wages, however, have not done the same.

Though the economy is slowly recovering from the Great Recession, large swaths of the American public are still bogged down by joblessness, underwater mortgages, and falling incomes. In fact, “between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent, to $49,909.”

But as the Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal pointed out, 2010, the first full year of the recovery, was very good for America’s richest 1 percent. In fact, that year the richest 1 percent captured 93 percent of the nation’s income gains:

Well, we finally have the estimated data for 2010 by income percentile, and it turns out that the top 1% had a fantastic year. The data is in the World Top Income Database, as well as Emmanuel Saez’s updated Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States…The takeaway quote from Saez should be: “The top 1% captured 93% of the income gains in the first year of recovery.”…The bottom 90% of Americans lost $127, the bottom 99% of Americans gained $80, and the top 1% gained $105,637. The bottom 99% is net positive for the year because of around $125 in average capital gains. They can take comfort in efforts by the Right to set the capital gains tax to 0%, which would have netted them an addition couple dozen bucks.

This chart shows that, even discounting capital gains (which are overwhelmingly made by the very rich), the very richest Americans have seen the fastest bounce back in terms of income (the blue line is the richest 0.1 percent, while the red is the richest 1 percent):

During the slow recovery, corporate profits have already roared back to their pre-recession heights. Wages, however, have yet to follow suit, leaving the 99 percent to struggle as the 1 percent enjoys a real recovery.