Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[wall_rus]

Since 1913, the United States witnessed only one other year of such unequal wealth distribution — 1928, the year before the stock market crashed, according to Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Such inequality is likely to impede an economic recovery, he said. Income analysts Piketty and Saez [MS Excel] have constructed a widely cited income series back to 1913, using Internal Revenue Service data that include realized capital gains and include higher incomes. Their data show that after falling with the stock market bust of 2001, the average income of the top 1% grew about 50% in real terms from 2002 to -2006, from about $850,000 to $1.3 million (2007 dollars). Coming on top of the long-term trend in rising inequality since the late 1970s, this recent surge has resulted in the second highest level of income concentration on record going back to 1913, as the richest 1% of households held 23% of income in 2006. The only year of greater income concentration was 1928 (24%).

http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_econindicators_income_20080826