Here's an excellent new report from Bloomberg:
Top 1% Got 93% of Income Growth as Rich-Poor Gap Widened
The divergent fortunes of Reyes and Hemsley show that the U.S. has gone through two recoveries. The 1.2 million households whose incomes put them in the top 1 percent of the U.S. saw their earnings increase 5.5 percent last year, according to estimates released last month by the U.S. Census Bureau. Earnings fell 1.7 percent for the 96 million households in the bottom 80 percent -- those that made less than $101,583.
The recovery that officially began in mid-2009 hasn’t arrived in most Americans’ paychecks. In 2010, the top 1 percent of U.S. families captured as much as 93 percent of the nation’s income growth, according to a March paper by Emmanuel Saez, a University of California at Berkeley economist who studied Internal Revenue Service data. The earnings gap between rich and poor Americans was the widest in more than four decades in 2011, Census data show, surpassing income inequality previously reported in Uganda and Kazakhstan. The notion that each generation does better than the last -- one aspect of the American Dream -- has been challenged by evidence that average family incomes fell last decade for the first time since World War II.
Yes, there is class warfare going on, but it's not from any political campaign. It's from the reality on the ground. Remember when the propaganda surrounding how the Iraq war was going in 2004 and beyond was skewered by the Bush Administration and their surrogates? The same is happening to American families. Republicans claim that Obama is starting a class warfare fight by insisting the rich aren't paying their fair share. While I have not been happy with many of Obam's policy choices he's right about that statement. Righties also claim Obama's being racist against the top 1%ers. Oh those poor people.I know, it's f*&king stupid and ineffective, but that's conservatives for you.
It's a great article so read the whole thing.
