One Out Of Two Dollars Earned Goes To Only 10% Of Americans

[phantom power]

If you starting to sense that things are just harder for you in recent years and that there’s all this American wealth that you’re not able to get a piece of, no matter how hard you work, then you’re not crazy. That’s exactly what’s going on. Since Reagan became President, the amount of income and wealth that goes to the very wealthiest in this country has been climbing, and now we’re hitting record levels.

The top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the country’s total income in 2012, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting the relevant data a century ago, according to an updated study by the prominent economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.

The top 1 percent took more than one-fifth of the income earned by Americans, one of the highest levels on record since 1913, when the government instituted an income tax.

As Annie Lowrey of the New York Times says, this country really is in a new Gilded Age, a 21st century Dickens novel.

The rich have such an unfair share of the nation’s collective wealth that even the bleedout of wealth during the recession was barely a blip on the radar, as these charts show:



Because of the pressure from right wing media and just the general ease with which people kick around the poor in this country, most of the discourse about who deserves what is about debating how much food we’ll allow the poor to have. It should be obvious, but this is the bigger problem. Imagine if half your paycheck was taken away and given over to people who are far more wealthy than you could ever hope to be. That’s basically what’s going on. There’s no way that the top 10% of earners are working so much harder than everyone else that they deserve half the money. That’s an asinine argument.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/11/one-out-of-two-dollars-earned-goes-to-only-10-of-americans/