The Standard and Poor's rating agency said in a new report that the wealth gap in the United States continues to grow, and it is affecting the country's economic growth.

The report argues income equality makes the economy more prone to extreme economic swings, an uncompetitive workforce, and discourages investment and hiring.

Income inequality rose by 20 percent from 1979 to 2010 according to the U.S. Gini coefficient, a widely-used measure of income inequality, and the Congressional Budget Office showed that after-tax income grew 15.5 percent for the top 1 percent earners, but grew by less than 1 percent for the bottom 90 percent of earners, according to the report.

S&P found that government policies on taxation and government wealth transfers, including Social Security and Medicare, have not significantly reduced income inequality. Many government programs aren't limited to assisting lower-income households and extend to wealthier groups more than they did at their inception. "The bottom 20 percent of households received only 36 percent of transfer payments in 2010, but received 54 percent in 1979," said the report.

The solution argues the report is more education and not increased taxes. If the average American worker completed one more year of school, GDP would grow by "half a percentage point -- $105 billion -- over the next five years." And the report "advises against using the tax code to try to narrow the gap, saying higher taxes on the wealthy could remove incentives for people to work and cause business to hire fewer employers."

According to analysis by USA TODAY, "living the American Dream would cost the average family of four $130,000 a year (today.) Only 16 million US households -- around 1 in 8 -- earned that much in 2013." The median salary in the U.S. is $51,000.

A Gallup poll released Wednesday, however, shows U.S. Latinos are more positive about their standard of living than whites or blacks.

The poll included interviews with 1,800 blacks and Latinos in 2014 and is based on yearly averages of tracking interviews from January through July 2014. Eighty-two percent of Latinos says they are satisfied rather than dissatisfied with their standard of living, compared with 79 percent of whites and 70 percent of blacks.

The report finds this might be a perceptual difference rather than one grounded in reality, as whites report much higher annual household incomes on average than Latinos or blacks, and the Latino unemployment rate is twice that of whites.

The report argues one major reason for Latinos' upbeat responses is because they tend to be younger adults than whites or blacks. Roughly three-quarters of Latinos are younger than 50, whereas little more than half of U.S. whites are. And it could be that the optimism stems from the lower standard of living workers can earn in their home countries, as many of those polled were recent immigrants to the U.S. A Latino's annual income is $36,000 or less.