Off-The-Charts Income Gains For Super-Rich

By Zachary Roth
The Lookout - Yahoo News
April 8, 2011

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:

http://tinyurl.com/42eazf3

'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.

'One can argue about why this is happening. Some say
it's the result of a decline in workers' bargaining
power as labor unions have weakened, while others blame
the rise of offshoring and outsourcing. But despite the
best efforts of some commentators, there's really no
serious debate about the overall realignment of income
in our age: The already super-rich have vastly
increased their share of the pie--at the expense of
everyone else.'

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