March 26, 2012

New statistics show an ever-more-startling divergence between the fortunes of the wealthy and everybody else. Even in a country used to income inequality, these thefts are stunning. In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households. Still more astonishing was the extent to which the super rich got rich faster than the merely rich. In 2010, 37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a teaspoon-size collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. These fortunate few saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent. Meanwhile, the bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent, whose average income is $1,019,089, had an 11.6 percent increase in income. And now, House Republicans just passed a budget that is an unbelievable mess of highly regressive tax cuts, large but unspecified reductions in discretionary spending (a category that importantly includes education, infrastructure, and research and development), and an evisceration of programs devoted to lifting those at the bottom, including unemployment insurance, food stamps, earned income tax credits, and many more. Obviously, policies of this sort would exacerbate the very problem of income inequality that most needs fixing. But that is clearly fundamental to their plan to turn the United States into a banana republic. God Bless America.