How Bush Widened The Wealth Gap

[steve2470]

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_44/b3906038_mz007.htm


Not since the '20s has income inequality been this great

During the last half-century the distribution of income and wealth in America has become more and more unequal. Even during the 1990s, a period of sustained expansion, most of the growth in income and wealth was concentrated among the top 10% of households. By 2000 this group accounted for 44% of total household income, compared with 33% in 1980.

Today the top 1% of households receives more pretax income than the bottom 40%. And the distribution of wealth is even more lopsided. The top 1% of households owns nearly 40% of total household wealth -- more than the bottom 90% of households combined -- and earns half of all capital income. Income and wealth are more unevenly distributed among Americans than at any time since the Jazz Age of the 1920s. On measures of income and wealth inequality, the U.S. tops the charts among the advanced industrial nations.

YET RATHER THAN fashion economic policy to ameliorate the trends of growing income and wealth inequality, President Bush has championed policies that have exacerbated them. And if he is elected to a second term, he has put voters on notice that they should expect more of the same. A recent study by the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office confirms that the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts have disproportionately benefited the wealthiest households. The tax cuts have boosted the aftertax incomes of the top 1% of households, with average incomes in excess of $1,000,000, by 10% -- compared with a 2.3% increase for middle-income families with average incomes of $57,000 and a 1.6% increase for the bottom 20% of families, with average incomes of less than $17,000. The tax cuts for millionaires alone have reduced government revenues by $90 billion a year, more than the lost revenues from tax cuts for the 80% of families making less than $100,000. Ninety billion dollars a year is more than enough to pay for the comprehensive health-care plan proposed by John Kerry and for the promises President Bush himself made but has not funded in his No Child Left Behind education bill.
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[ogradda]

1. gee i wonder

if that new corporate tax bill he signed this morning will help?:eyes: