President Obama claimed Wednesday that "inequality" is narrowing under his administration, but his own White House admits that when it comes to income inequality, things have actually gotten worse.

"We have a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving," Obama said Wednesday. "Inequality is narrowing, the housing market is healing [and] the stock market has nearly tripled."

Obama didn't specify if he was talking about income inequality or something else. But last week, White House economist Jason Furman admitted in remarks to a British think tank that income inequality has increased drastically under the current administration.

Furman said the U.S. has continued to see "faster growth and higher levels of income inequality" in the last several years, especially compared to other advanced economies.

A slide show Furman used during his presentation included a graph that showed a significant spike in the share of income earned by the top 1 percent shortly after Obama took office, and again around 2014.



Furman, who has chaired the White House Council of Economic Advisers since 2013, offered a series of explanations for the surge, an increased demand for skilled laborers and simultaneous slowdown in the growth in the relative supply of skill, and a reduction of bargaining power among workers.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office did find a brief decrease in income inequality in 2013, shortly after Obama raised taxes on high-income earners.

"That decrease in income inequality stemmed primarily from the higher rates faced by high-income taxpayers in that year, which made the federal tax system the most progressive it has been since the mid-1990s," the CBO wrote in a report earlier this summer.