On CBS Sunday Morning this morning, Tim Noah commented on what has become known as “the Great Divergence,” the widening income gap between the haves and the rest of us. As the graph indicates, it all began with the Reagan years and keeps growing and growing and growing . (It was published Friday by Ezra Klein in the Washington Post and is based on numbers provided by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)
As Chad Stone of Off the Charts reports, “the highest-income 1 percent of American households in 2008 … remained highly concentrated, with the top 1 percent receiving 21 percent of the nation’s total pre-tax income. That’s among the highest percentages since [the] Roaring Twenties.”
Stone concludes, “it wouldn’t be surprising if the Great Recession proved to be just another speed bump on the road to even greater concentration of income at the top.”
Stupid socialist math. As Tim Noah said, “We can’t turn back the clock [to 1950]. But let’s at least recognize that fate did not decree that rich people should gobble up nearly all this past generation’s income growth.”
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