Income disparity under Bush
Prompted by Paul Krugman, I went to look at the CBO's recently released effective income tax statistics and discovered a statistic even more compelling than those Krugman offers up at his web site. Here's the total growth in after-tax income between 2001 (the beginning of Bush's assumption of the kingship) and 2005 (the most recent data available):
Average growth for the lower 60% of the families, by income: -3.5%
Average growth for the top 10 % of the families, by income: 14.8%
Average growth for the top 5 % of the families, by income: 17.6%
Average growth for the top 1 % of the families, by income: 30.1%
In other words, a significant majority of the population saw their after tax income fall (in real terms), while the richest 1% saw their income increase by more than 30% over Bush's reign. No surprises there, but them's the facts.
posted by walldon | 11:29 AM
1 Comments:
Fantastic find, Walldon. Hard to make it clearer than that. Love the color-coding:
“Chances are, unfortunately, that’s YOU in the RED bar. If you live in a nice area with a comparable but not spectacular income – still middle class, but very white collar, shall we say -- you are one of the LIGHTER GREENS, and you’ve done OK (although you damn well better hold onto your job so you don’t lose that health insurance). It’s the DEEP GREENS that we are envious of, and that you almost certainly are not – and the Republican have been treating them really, really nicely.
Remember Chevy Chase on the early SNL? New version: “Hi, I’m DEEP GREEN and you’re not!”
Post a Comment
<< Home