Bottom 90% loses / Top one-hundredth of 1% make out like bandits!

[LongTomH]

The chart was originally published in the Wall Street Journal of all places. I got the chart from Sen. Bernie Sanders Facebook page.

There's also a link to the original study, done by economist Emmanuel Saez of Berkeley. Warning! It's a PDF of 10 pages, and rather wonkish.

The upshot is: The elites, top 0.01% to 0.1% lost big in the 'Great Recession;' but, they've made all of it back -- plus big gains. That's been the historical norm in most recessions. The one big exception to that rule was after the Great Depression of the 30s, when Roosevelt's New Deal actively re-distributed incomes and with the rise in power of unions.

The labor market has been creating much more inequality over the last thirty years, with the very top earners capturing a large fraction of macro economic productivity gains. A number of factors may help explain this increase in inequality, not only underlying technological changes but also the retreat of institutions developed during the New Deal and World War II - such as progressive tax policies, powerful unions, corporate provision of health and retirement benefits, and changing social norms regarding pay inequality. We need to decide as a society whether this increase in income inequality is efficient and acceptable and, if not, what mix of institutional and tax reforms should be developed to counter it.