11 Charts That Show Income Inequality keeps getting worse - Mother Jones

[Bill USA]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/america-income-inequality-wealth-net-worth-charts

It's no secret that the United States has a glaring—and growing—problem with inequality. The Great Recession made things worse, and the recent economic recovery remains uneven, and unevenly distributed. Families in the bottom 99 percent of households have recovered just 60 percent of their income losses from the economic slump, according to a recent analysis of tax data by University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez.

Meanwhile, the superrich keep getting richer: The average family in the top 1 percent of earners makes 40 times more than the average family in the bottom 90 percent of households. Families in the top 0.01 percent—the 1 percent of the 1 percent—make, on average, a whopping 198 times more than those in the bottom 90 percent, according to Saez and fellow economist Thomas Piketty's data.

It's no wonder, then, that despite millions of jobs being added under President Barack Obama and an economy that looks good on paper, many voters who felt left out of the recovery turned out for Donald Trump. "An economy that fails to deliver growth for half of its people for an entire generation is bound to generate discontent with the status quo and a rejection of establishment politics," Saez, Piketty, and fellow economist Gabriel Zucman recently wrote in a post for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Trump tapped into that discontent—now we'll see if he and his billionaire-packed Cabinet can recover those decades of lost prosperity for most Americans.

Here's a closer look at the current state of income and wealth inequality:

The middle class is still struggling

First, some good news: Last year, middle-class households reaped an income gain of 5.2 percent, the highest level since 2007. Now the bad news: Despite such overdue gains, average American households are barely making more than they did in 1980. Median household incomes have risen just 17 percent (in real dollars) during the past 35 years, lagging far behind GDP growth. Meanwhile, the corporate profits and the average income of the top 1 percent of earners has skyrocketed.

click to see chart

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[2naSalit]

1. If that graph

were turned upright, it looks like the outline of a spire at the Kremlin!