Marxist class warfare?
In 1980, 14.6% of income in the U.S. was earned by the top 5% of income
earners and the bottom 20% reported earnings of 5.3%.
Those numbers changed slowly until 1997 when the top 5% of earners had grown to the point where they had 20.7% of the U.S. total income and the bottom 20% had dropped to 4.2% of U.S. income.
The surprise is that these numbers haven’t changed in the past decade no matter how loudly the NYTimes, the Left or Paul Krugman screams. Pp 464 table 680
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On December 14th, the Wall Street Journal published an article by Alan Reynolds that pointed out how misleading the data I used is. Because of the Reagan ceiling on the top marginal tax rates, passed in 1982, a significant amount of income, previously not reported on income taxe returns, became reported as people were willing to be taxed on the Schedule C businesses report. Since then other tax changes, such as the reduced dividend tax rate, have brought much more income into to the total reported income stream as well as into the top bracket.
The reality is that the income spread in the US has been steadily declining and much more rapidly declining in the most recent past decade.