America’s Tilt to the Top: The Deepest Stats Yet

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:




America’s Tilt to the Top: The Deepest Stats Yet
October 29, 2011

All sorts of federal agencies publish income inequality data. But only the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office directly takes on America’s income inequality deniers.

By Sam Pizzigati


Back in 1979, America’s most affluent 1 percent took home — after federal taxes — about the same share of the nation’s income as all the Americans in the bottom 20 percent. In 2007, Americans learned last week, the nation’s top 1 percent took home more income than America’s entire bottom 40 percent.

These new stats didn’t come from some scruffy Occupy Wall Street encampment. They came — in a blockbuster new report — from the buttoned-down number crunchers at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. And the portrait they paint essentially gives the Occupy movement’s most basic insight, that our top 1 percent has hijacked the nation, an official government imprimatur.

Over the past three decades, the new CBO study documents, the deep pockets who make up our top 1 percent have more than doubled their share of America’s after-tax income, “from nearly 8 percent in 1979 to 17 percent in 2007.”

What makes the new CBO figures so significant? Other federal agencies, after all, do regularly drop their oars into America’s income distribution waters. But the statistics these agencies report never quite capture the complete big picture. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://toomuchonline.org/our-tilt-to-the-top-the-deepest-stats-yet/