[lit-ideas] nyt, study on wealth disparity in US
- From: Carol Kirschenbaum <carolkir@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2006 01:28:54 -0700
FYI--This piece is available through NYT "select." I snipped a tiny bit of
it here. E-me if you'd like to receive the rest. I find it quite
interesting. It's a rather long article quoting a new study on the
surprising and growing income disparity in the US. The super-rich and the
rest of us. .
Carol
*************************************
"The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank,
compared the latest data from Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez to comprehensive
reports on income trends from the Congressional Budget Office. Every way it
sliced the data, it found a striking share of total income concentrated at
the top(pdf) of the income ladder as of 2004.
. The top 10 percent of households had 46 percent of the nation's income,
their biggest share in all but two of the last 70 years.
. The top 1 percent of households had 19.5 percent (see graph).
. The top one-tenth of 1 percent of households actually received nearly half
of the increased share going to the top 1 percent.
These disparaties seem large, and they are. (Though the latest availabe data
is from 2004, there are virtually no signs that the basic trend has changed
since then.) The top 1 percent held a bigger share of total income than at
any time since 1929, except for 1999 and 2000 during the tech stock bubble.
But what makes those disparities particularly brutal is that unlike the last
bull market of the late 1990's - when a proverbial rising tide was lifting
all boats - the rich have been the only winners lately. According to an
analysis by Goldman Sachs, for most American households - the bottom 60
percent - average income grew by less than 20 percent from 1979 to 2004,
with virtually all of those gains occurring from the mid- to late 1990's.
Before and since, real incomes for that group have basically flatlined.
The best-off Americans are not only winning by an extraordinary margin right
now. They are the only ones who are winning at all. "
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