From Marr's blog: As I’ve noted before, over the last three decades a stunning shift in income has taken place in this country, from the middle class to those few at the very top of the income scale. Back in 1979, the middle 20 percent of Americans had more than twice as large a share of the nation’s total after-tax income as the top 1 percent. But by 2007, the top 1 percent’s slice of the economic pie had more than doubled and in fact exceeded the middle class’s slice, which had shrunk.
This great income shift means the average middle-income American family had about $9,000 less after-tax income in 2007, and an average household in the top 1 percent had $741,000 more, than they would have had if the 1979 income distribution had remained. Here’s how this looks in graph and table form:
For an excellent argument about why the tax cuts to the wealthiest 1% should be allowed to expire at the end of this year, written by one of the nation's top economists at the University of Chicago, click here.
1 comment:
Hmmmm....Do you think that eliminating all taxes on the upper 1% and changing the federal tax structure to have a reverse progressive tax, culminating with a 100% tax on the bottom quintile might create the kind of society that Richard Mellon Scaife, the Koch brothers, the Coors family desire? It would certainly set up the conditions for bringing back the idea of outright slavery and indentured servitude.
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