Wealthiest Americans Take Home Biggest Share of Income Ever Recorded

[Jefferson23]

Whose recovery, you ask? Why, the top 1 percent's, of course.

September 11, 2013 |





The top ten percent of earners in the United States took home more than 50 percent of all income in 2012, the highest amount ever recorded since data was first collected in 1917, according to an updated report from economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.

While the wealthiest took a big hit during the financial crisis, they’ve almost fully recovered. Last year, income for the top 1 percent of earners “increased sharply,” the report notes, growing by nearly 20 percent, while the bottom 99 percent only saw money rise by 1 percent. “In sum,” the authors write, “top 1% incomes are close to full recovery while bottom 99% incomes have hardly started to recover.”

This follows a trend since the recovery officially began. From 2009 to 2012, income for the 1 percent grew by 31.4 percent, while everyone else only saw it grow by 0.4 percent. That means the 1 percent “captured 95% of the income gains in the first three years of the recovery,” they write.

The authors point out that rather than the Great Recession helping to mitigate income inequality, which has skyrocketed since the 1970s, it only temporarily disrupted a trend that is now continuing. And policy isn’t helping. Given that recessions only have a temporary impact on top earners “unless drastic regulation and tax policy changes are implemented and prevent income concentration from bouncing back,” the United States would have to aggressively implement changes that could reverse the trend. That’s what happened after the Great Depression, when the New Deal was enacted. But the response to the Great Recession, which mostly amounted to the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and an increase in the top tax rate, “are modest relative to the policy changes that took place coming out of the Great Depression,” they write. It’s unlikely they will make any lasting change.

in full: http://www.alternet.org/economy/wealthiest-americans-take-home-50-all-income

[woo me with science]

1. Don't worry! There's a plan in the works!

The TPP and a new Grand Bargain! And....

Oh, wait.

[Jefferson23]

2. Criminal, that's what it was and the response to correct it, I don't have to tell you.

Congress Has Cut Discretionary Funding By $1.5 Trillion Over Ten Years
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3840

[woo me with science]

3. Devastating link. Thank you.

[woo me with science]

4. I'll say it again. It was a restructuring, not a recovery, and it was deliberate.

If it weren't deliberate, the devastation of the middle class, the driving of millions of Americans into poverty, would be considered a crisis of national proportions. We would see bullhorns a la 9/11 promising action to fix the catastrophe.

What is on the horizon instead? What is our President interested in instead?

Austerity. Grand Bargains. Cutting Social Security. A massive new "free trade" agreement that will eliminate jobs, slash salaries and benefits, and drive the standard of living down even further, while handing unprecedented power to multinational corporations. And more spying and assaults on our Constitutional protections to ensure that Americans cannot fight back.

[Jefferson23]

5. I don't know the answer. I did watch OWS as a reaction to it, the crimes, but it failed

for many reasons. Where it did not fail, imo, is that Americans are paying attention, a bit more
than they're given credit for doing. They're also not supporting strikes on Syria, at least not yet,
not in any great capacity.

I'm not sure how much worse it can get before Americans rally again, demanding public funded elections.

[Useless in FL]

6. You are oh so right!

I wish I could paste this on my FB page..... This is exactly what happened...and continues to happen! I am totally exasperated at the total robbery from the middle and lower classes. It just makes me SICK. How do these people live with themselve??????

[Brigid]

7. The last time income disparity was this bad was the '20's.

And we all know what happened after that.

[progressoid]

8. Rec!

[Scuba]

9. Trickle down works, if you understand the goal ...

[Art_from_Ark]

14. Here's a rec for that cartoon

Trickle down = trickle on

[PD Turk]

10. Grab your buckets!!

Grab your buckets and get outside, this ought to be the best trickle down we've ever seen!!

[Octafish]

11. Don't worry! Help is on the way!

Larry Summers has a plan. And that 1-percent will be in orbit! Gah-ran-teed.

[Jefferson23]

12. omg, that man is dangerous.

truly.

[Octafish]

13. Evidence of an American Plutocracy: The Larry Summers Story

By Matthew Skomarovsky
LilSis.org
Jan 10, 2011 at 19:31 EST

EXCERPT...

Another new business model Rubin and Summers made possible was Enron. Rubin had known Enron well through Goldman Sachs’s financing of the company, and recused himself from matters relating to Enron in his first year on the Clinton team. He and Summers went on to craft policies at Treasury that were essential to Enron’s lucrative energy trading business, and they were in touch with Enron executives and lobbyists all the while. Enron meanwhile won $2.4 billion in foreign development deals from Clinton’s Export-Import Bank, then run by Kenneth Brody, a former protege of Rubin’s at Goldman Sachs.

Soon after Rubin joined Citigroup, its investment banking division picked up Enron as a client, and Citigroup went on to become Enron’s largest creditor, loaning almost $1 billion to the company. As revelations of massive accounting fraud and market manipulation emerged over the next years and threatened to bring down the energy company, Rubin and Summers intervened. While Enron’s rigged electricity prices in California were causing unprecedented blackouts, Summers urged Governor Gray Davis to avoid criticizing Enron and recommended further deregulatory measures. Rubin was an official advisor to Gov. Davis on energy market issues at the time, while Citigroup was heavily invested in Enron’s fraudulent California business, and he too likely put pressure on the Governor to lay off Enron. Rubin also pulled strings at Bush’s Treasury Department in late 2001, calling a former employee to see if Treasury could ask the major rating agencies not to downgrade Enron, and Rubin also lobbied the rating agencies directly. (In all likelihood he made similar attempts in behalf of Citigroup during the recent financial crisis.) Their efforts ultimately failed, Enron went bust, thousands of jobs and pensions were destroyed, and its top executives went to jail. It’s hard to believe, but there was some white-collar justice back then.

SNIP...

Summers also starting showing up around the Hamilton Project, which Rubin had just founded with hedge fund manager Roger Altman. Altman was another Clinton official who had come from Wall Street, following billionaire Peter Peterson from Lehman Brothers to Blackstone Group, and he left Washington to found a major hedge fund in 1996. The Hamilton Project is housed in the Brookings Institution, a prestigious corporate-funded policy discussion center that serves as a sort of staging ground for Democratic elites in transition between government, academic, and business positions. The Hamilton Project would go on to host, more specifically, past and future Democratic Party officials friendly to the financial industry, and to produce a stream of similarly minded policy papers. Then-Senator Obama was the featured political speaker at Hamilton’s inaugural event in April 2006.

Summers joined major banking and political elites on Hamilton’s Advisory Council and appeared at many Hamilton events. During a discussion of the financial crisis in 2008, Summers was asked about his role in repealing Glass-Stegall, the law that forbade commercial and investment banking mergers like Citigroup. “I think it was the right thing to do,” he responded, noting that the repeal of Glass-Stegall made possible a wave of similar mergers during the recent financial crisis, such as Bank of America’s takeover of Merrill Lynch. He was arguing, in effect, that financial deregulation did not cause the financial crisis, it actually solved it. “We need a regulatory system as modern as the markets,” said Summers — quoting Rubin, who was in the room. “We need a hen house as modern as the food chain,” said the fox.

CONTINUED...

http://blog.littlesis.org/2011/01/10/evidence-of-an-ame... /

The guy is a lovely.

[Jefferson23]

15. Yep, and his legacy at the helm at Harvard was a trip too.

Dangerous guy.

[Fumesucker]

16. Two words

[Jefferson23]

17. Yep

Presidential scholars: Bush is the worst president of the modern era, bottom five of all time.

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/07/01/105514/scholars-bush-worst-president/

[Laelth]

18. k&r for the truth, however depressing it may be. n/t

-Laelth