Article: The Rich are getting Richer ,Faster

[Armstead]

11/3/2006, McClatchy Newspapers
http://bernie.house.gov/documents/document.asp?issueNum=5034

The rich are getting much richer, much faster than everyone else
by Kevin G. Hall
WASHINGTON - Over the past quarter-century, and especially in the last 10 years, America's very rich have grown much richer. No one else fared as well.

In 2004, the richest 1 percent of households - 719,910 of them, with an average annual income of $326,720 - had 19.8 percent of the entire nation's pretax income. That's up from 17.8 percent a year earlier, according to a study by University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez.

The study, titled "The Evolution of Top Incomes," also found that the richest one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans - 129,584 households in 2004 - reported income equal to 9.5 percent of national pretax income.

However, median, or midpoint, family income rose only 1.6 percent between 2001 and 2004, when adjusted for inflation, according to the Federal Reserve. Median family real net worth - a family's gross assets minus liabilities - rose only 1.5 percent during those four years.

Those are very sluggish income-growth rates compared with the four years between 1998 and 2001, when median family income grew by 9.5 percent and median family real net worth grew by 10.3 percent. Experts disagree on the causes, but they're in near agreement that this trend threatens to erode a fundamental American belief about fairness....

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[aquart]

1. The rich are insufficiently taxed.

NO MORE PARIS HILTONS!

[provis99]

2. yeah, i favor a greatly increased tax on millionaires,

but even then that only addresses the symptoms. I wonder how many millionaires simply lie around and live of their investments (or daddy's investments), and don't really produce anything themselves. Probably the majority. I roll my eyes everytime I hear about how well the middle class is doing in the media (exception the oddball Republican Lou Dobbs). Seems to me that income for the middle class has essentially been stagnant since the mid-70s, and income for working class people declining. Some serious changes are long past due.