(9 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
There are Two Americas, the wealth and the rest of us:
Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. The paper, which covers data through 2007, points to a staggering, unprecedented disparity in American incomes.
snip
Saez calculates that in 2007 the top .001 percent of American earners took home 6 percent of total U.S. wages, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2000.
As of 2007, the top decile of American earners, Saez writes, pulled in 49.7 percent of total wages, a level that’s “higher than any other year since 1917 and even surpasses 1928, the peak of stock market bubble in the ‘roaring” 1920s.'”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…
The entire paper is available here:
http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez…
From Saez’s paper:
[W]hile the bottom 99 percent of incomes grew at a solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993-2000, these incomes grew only 1.3 percent per year from 2002-2007. As a result, in the economic expansion of 2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth.”
Paul Krugman comments that it was “Even more gilded” than we thought.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c…
The charts from Saez at Krugman and HuffPo say it all.
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working people taking back America.
This disparity is actually at the crux of our problems and why WE, the people, lose all the time. We simply can’t compete with the wealth.
Note my comments here and here on that very subject.
Take your pick of any of numerous articles on the subject Alternet.org
Thank you for this, TomP!
Over the past thirty years increased diversion of money from of the poor to middle class Americans to the Plutocracy has been the huge under reported story of our time.
It’s death from a thousand cuts.
I bet that most Americans don’t have clear idea as to what regressive vs progressive taxation actually means.
for a long time — reduce ordinary Americans to the “serf” level. Maybe, that’s why there’s been such a robust attempt to get rid of immigrants — so Americans can take over their jobs, since none have been created.
to wipe out the middle class. We are on the same path that did in the Soviet Union, they called theirs socialism lol. Although we, the people never ‘owned’ this country the people made it built it, called it the Dream. FDR had it right democracy cannot exist with inequities like this. Scary part for me is the people themselves seem to confuse greed and capitalism with democracy. Individualism a trait uniquely American has morphed into screw you. Common good is called evil socialism.
The ruling class is killing the golden goose once again. An age old struggle this is. Somehow most are convinced that the common good is measured by things like, free market, GNP and large earth destroyers bought with credit. The Dream has been reduced to granite counter tops and dicey pyramid scams for all. How do you get the population to realize that common good and equality including economic, is real freedom. Without these we are just another totalitarian evil Empire that has enslaved and destroyed the real progress of humans from Babylon and into the future. The all time high for this particular society is just another number that measures the demise of any dream and relegates us to the fate of all the historic failed attempts to own the world by enslaving people.
…Hope you don’t mind my calling you TP; I have a particular affinity for TP.
Some more interesting facts on this topic in the video clip and comments at Edger’s diary today.
Something you’d THINK they’d consider when they start screwing us over to the point where they’re making HALF the money made in this country.
At some point, maybe not too far off now, we’re gonna have nothing to lose.
When we have nothing to lose, we get mighty dangerous.