Gap Between Richest And Poorest Now Higher Than It's Ever Been

[Initech]

WASHINGTON (AP) — The pay gap between the richest 1 percent and the rest of America widened to a record last year.

The top 1 percent of U.S. earners collected 19.3 percent of household income in 2012, their largest share in Internal Revenue Service figures going back a century.

U.S. income inequality has been growing for almost three decades. But until last year, the top 1 percent's share of pre-tax income had not yet surpassed the 18.7 percent it reached in 1927, according to an analysis of IRS figures dating to 1913 by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University.

One of them, Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, said the incomes of the richest Americans might have surged last year in part because they cashed in stock holdings to avoid higher capital gains taxes that took effect in January.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/top-1-percent-took-record-share-2012-us-income

USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!

[Egalitarian Thug]

1. What could possibly go wrong?

[indepat]

2. Extreme income inequity is good for America, that is its 1%, because the more extreme the poverty,

the more desperate people will become just to feed and shelter their families. Many will resort to drugs to cope and steal just to eat, so multitudes can be put in private prisons and farmed out to other for-profit corporations. See, a ludicrously low minimum wage works out so well for the 1% that there is little/no interest in increasing the minimum wage to a livable level. Welcome to a right-wing society brought to you by bought politicians.