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Welcome to the One Percent Recovery

Mon, 04/30/2012 - 16:45 — Dave Culver
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Economics
  • As the 1% reap 93 percent of the income gains from the recovery, we’re rapidly returning to pre-New Deal levels of inequality.
  • Robert Scheer | Halfway Through the Lost Decade

Mike Konczal, New Deal 2.0

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Kevin Zeese

This article is made possible with the generous contributions of Evergreene Digest readers like you. Thank you!

There was a brief debate focused on the following question: would the gains of the economy continue to accrue to the top 1% once the recovery started, or would they have a weak post-recession showing in terms of raw income growth as well as income share of the economy? The top 1% had a rough Great Recession. They absorbed 50 percent of the income losses, and their share of income dropped from 23.5 percent to 18.1 percent. Was this a new state of affairs, or would the 1% bounce back in 2010?

We finally have the estimated data for 2010 by income percentile, and it turns out that the top 1% had a fantastic year. The data is in the World Top Income Database, as well as Emmanuel Saez’s updated “Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States” (as well as the Excel spreadsheet on his webpage). Timothy Noah has a first set of responses here. The takeaway quote from Saez is, “the top 1% captured 93% of the income gains in the first year of recovery.”

Full story...

Related:

Robert Scheer | Halfway Through the Lost Decade, Robert Scheer, Truthdig
In the end, the perpetrators of this calamity have been rewarded, and their patsies, the ordinary folks who are supposed to matter in a democracy, have been cast overboard.
 

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