"Trick or Trickle?
THE RICHEST GET RICHER
Charles R. Morris
Over the past few years, the enormous share of income claimed by the very rich has become one of the hottest of political issues. (See “Economic Injustice for Most,” Commonweal, August 13, 2004.) Much of the data documenting the income shifts has been collected by two economists, Emmanuel Saez, of the University of California at Berkeley, and Thomas Piketty at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Their study is based on analyses of the entire database of personal federal income tax returns.
The primary revelation from the Saez-Piketty research has been how much of the nation’s income gains have gone to a tiny group of the very richest people, a fact that had been obscured by the much broader groupings produced by Census Bureau samples. Saez and Piketty have recently updated their research to include 2005 tax filings, which confirm that the trend toward greater income concentration has grown even more pronounced.
The figures are startling. Since 1980, a period of prolonged stagnation in inflation-adjusted median incomes, the income share of the bottom 90 percent of families has fallen by about 17 percent (see Figure 1). Even the very upper-middle class folks in the 90-95 income percentiles barely kept their shares constant, while the top one-thousandth and top ten-thousandth have more than doubled and tripled their shares. The top ten-thousandth, fewer than fifteen thousand taxpayers, now collect 3 percent of all personal income..."
http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=1928