Battleangel

Don’t know how fresh this article is but I hadn’t seen it before so it goes on the board. The data is no older than a year nevertheless.

Economist via AA – Since 1979, median family incomes have risen by 18% but the incomes of the top 1% have gone up by 200%. In 1970, according to the Census Bureau, the bottom fifth received 5.4% of America’s total national income and the richest fifth got 40.9%. Twenty-five years later, the share of the bottom fifth had fallen to 4.4% but that of the top fifth had risen to 46.5%. This makes America unusual. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez examined the incomes of the top 0.1% of people in America, France and Britain from 1913 to 1998. The fortunes of the three countries’ super-rich kept fairly closely in step for most of the 20th century, until America began to diverge in the late 1970s. Now the top 0.1% of Americans earn two or three times as much as their peers in Britain and France.

For more reading on the subject there is an older article by Michael Parenti here.