Off-the-charts income gains for super-rich

[Donnachaidh]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110408/ts_yblog_thelookout/off-the-charts-income-gains-for-super-rich

In recent years, we've been hit with a barrage of statistics, charts, and even full-length books, documenting how inequality is on the rise in America.

But very few of them capture what's happened over the last 30 years or so as well as this image:



Put together by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington think tank, the chart is pretty self-explanatory. It shows that the 30 years following the Second World War were a time of broadly shared prosperity: Income for the bottom 90 percent of American households roughly kept pace with economic growth.

But over the last 35 years, there's been an abrupt shift: Total growth has slowed marginally, but the real change has been in how the results of that growth are distributed. Now, the bottom 90 percent have seen their income rise only by a tiny fraction of total growth, while income for the richest 1 percent has exploded by upwards of 275 percent.

more at the link --

[Atman]

1. It's time to stop using the term "income gains" and call it what it is...theft.

If there can be such a thing as legally sanctioned theft. When the criminals are writing their own laws, legality and morality become rather muddy. But make no mistake...it's theft, by a group of criminals with access to unlimited resources not available to the average street thug.

[Cresent City Kid]

3. I agree

The right doesn't even call it "income gains" they call it "wealth creation" as if the rich were the source of money, not the destination. Expect the term "Job Creators" to be thrown around for the next two years.

[originalpckelly]

4. We're being robbed blind...

and our political leaders are just letting it happen, because if they are not rich themselves, they get their campaign money from them.

[xchrom]

2. recommend

[subterranean]

5. What about the 90-99 percentile group?

Why were they left out of the graph?

It shows the top 1% and the bottom 90%, but skips the 9% in between.

[subterranean]

6. Doesn't it seem that the richer they get, the more they whine

about taxes and regulations?

[somone]

7. The moat has to be widened and deepened

to make it harder for pitchforks and torches