U.S. Wealth Is Now the Most Concentrated at the Top Since 1916

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/us-wealth-now-most-concentrated-top-1916

A new report shows that income in the U.S. in 2012 was more concentrated at the top than at any time since 1916.

A bit more than one twenty-fifth of all income in the U.S. is now being taken in by the top one-ten-thousandth of the U.S. population. That one rich statistical person is bringing in considerably more income than all of the poorest 2,000 people do in that same statistical 10,000 Americans.

We must go back nearly a hundred years to find a time when the top 0.01%, the top 1 in 10,000 people in the U.S., were making more than 4% of the nation’s total income, as they were in the latest calculated year, 2012. This figure of income-concentration among the top 0.01% was the all-time high 4.4% in 1916. In 1915, it was 4.36%. Before that, it was under 3%. And it has never again been anywhere near 4%, until 2012, when it broke through the 4% barrier yet again, for the first time in 97 years, at 4.08%. Other than in 2012, the highest it has been in recent decades was 3.53% in 2007, under Bush, at the peak right before the 2008 crash. This money-concentration is now more extreme than it was even then – even at Bush’s peak.

The details are being reported at the global academic database of income-distribution, which is called “The World Top Incomes Database,” and which is headed by the world’s four leading researchers on income-distribution: Tony Atkinson, Facundo Alvaredo, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez.

[Laelth]

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

-Laelth

[cantbeserious]

2. Welcome To Ayn Rand Hell And Republican Wet Dreams

eom

[B Calm]

3. Well I think we know who is winning the class war. . .

[BOG PERSON]

10. it's not a war if one side is constantly in retreat

n/t

[socialist_n_TN]

12. Yep. It's only class "war" if we fight back.....

Up to now it's been a class massacre.

[Wilms]

4. ^

[JDPriestly]

5. K&R.

[Romulox]

6. This always happens when there's a Republican in the White House...

[davekriss]

8. This always happens

When you have unpatriotic, obstructionist Republicans in congress, preventing almist all legislation that would help the 99%.

Having said that, I acknowledge that Obama governs as a right-of-center Friedmanite, which is harmful to progress for all and helps progress for the few.

[Romulox]

9. Obama had 2 years of a Democratic majority in Congress. He used it to "save" the financial elite

from their own folly.

The consequences are entirely expected.

[davekriss]

19. Understood

But that's the "right-of-center Friedmanite" in Obama (neo-liberal through and through). I understood where he stood prior to November 2008, so I am not surprised by anything that has transpired. However I think Republicans deserve ALL the blame for extending the Great Recession.

[marmar]

7. K&R

[Coyotl]

11. The flow of capital has become practically institutionalized, as has The Great Demise it causes.

At the end of the day, the pewriod beginning with Reagan will become known as The Great Demise.

[socialist_n_TN]

13. And a few things of world-wide significance....

happened in 1917.

[jwirr]

15. That is what I was thinking. Events that followed could easily repeat themselves.

[socialist_n_TN]

17. Yep. As Lenin said *paraphrasing*.......

Sometimes years go by with nothing happening and sometimes years go by in months.

[kenny blankenship]

14. Obamanomics is a success!

[kentuck]

16. The Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913...

Along with the federal income tax.

I'm sure this may have had something to do with it?

[pampango]

18. The income tax certainly did. - "The Hidden Progressive History of Income Tax"

The income tax was the most popular economic justice movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. This truly grassroots movement forced politicians to act in order to stay in office, leading to the 16th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913. That’s right, the income tax was so popular that the nation passed a constitutional amendment so that the right-wing Supreme Court couldn’t overturn it.

Income and Tax Inequality in the Late 19th Century

Everyday Americans hated the tax system of the Gilded Age. The federal government gathered taxes in two ways. First, it placed high tariff rates on imports. These import taxes protected American industries from competition. This allowed companies to charge high prices on products that the working class needed to survive while also protecting the monopolies that controlled their everyday lives. Second, the government had high excise taxes on tobacco and alcohol, two products used heavily by the American working class.

These forms of indirect taxes meant that almost the entirety of federal tax revenue came from the poor while the rich paid virtually nothing. This spawned enormous outrage. The poor had a model in creating an income tax—President Abraham Lincoln, who instituted the nation’s first income tax to pay for the Civil War. Lincoln’s Revenue Act of 1861 created a graduated tax on everyone who made at least $800 a year, allowing him to pay for the war. Although a grand success, Republicans pulled away from it as they backed off of racial equality in the late 1860s and it was overturned in 1872.

The income tax became such an overwhelming political movement during the 1890s that Congress, despite so many members' close relationship with the plutocracy, passed an income tax law that would have forced the rich to begin paying income taxes for the first time since 1870. The Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894 placed a 2% tax on incomes over $4000 a year (approximately $88,000 today). Corporations immediately organized against this. In a strategy we can recognize today, the Chamber of Commerce distorted the bill’s purpose, telling the public that the income tax would drive them into poverty, even though the bill did not affect working-class people.

http://www.alternet.org/labor/hidden-progressive-history-income-tax?akid=9361.277129.2KDGDd&rd=1&src=newsletter706781&t=14

Today attacking the income tax is a favorite right wing pastime. It seems that it was a favorite target of theirs 100 years ago as well.