Obama: Nation must address growing opportunity gap

President Barack Obama has said the nation must stop viewing its growing income gap as a strictly minority issue if US income inequality is to be tackled.

"The fact is this opportunity gap in America is now as much about class as it is about race, and that gap is growing," he said in a speech at the Center for American Progress.

Children of working-class parents are 10 times more likely to go through a period of parental unemployment than upper-class children, Mr Obama added.

"If we are going to take on growing inequality and try to improve upward mobility for all people... we have to reject a politics that suggests any effort to address it in a meaningful way pits a deserving middle class against those of an undeserving poor deserving hand outs," he said.