The Occupy Wall Street movement has made the phrase “the 99 percent” the hottest new political buzzword. So just how different has the experience of the top 1 percent been from everyone else’s over the past decade?
As the chart above shows, when it comes to real-income growth – that is, after accounting for the effects of inflation – the difference is substantial.
Source: Some radical anarchistic organization or something.
So yeah, there is, apparently.
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The Republicans are fighting for a world where everyone can be in the top 1%, a world where cutting taxes makes the deficit go down, a world where praying is the best choice for the economy, a world where it’s your own fault if you don’t have a job even if, numerically, there are more people than jobs.
If people are dumb enough to keep voting for an Impossible Wonderland, they are going to get a very possible disaster…again.
One note of caution. It’s not a battle between the 99%, many of whom get their politics straight from Rush Limbaugh’s lips, against the 1%, who also span the political spectrum. It’s a battle to shape the kind of society in which we want to live. That 1% line in your graph is a symptom. And it’s certainly true that the 1% have benefited by its direction. But the lines don’t identify political sides.
The difference is more than obscene. It’s sickening.
…uh, what’s the scale on the right?
Current income vs 1979 baseline, expressed as a percentage. Apparently. “Where does your income fall on this chart?” is pretty well meaningless.
Azkyroth,
It appears to be the 1979 equivalent of $100 of after tax income.
Why do I care if someone else makes more money than I? If I look at the line that is “me” and it has been rising then does it matter if someone else’s line has been rising more? If “my” line was always negatively correlated to the rising line then it might matter (although correlation is not causation) and I do not see such a correlation in the first place. It surprises me that even we skeptics are receptive to this obvious demagoguery. Again, I do not see how these graphs indicate in any way that the 1% getting richer injures the rest of us. The only possible explanation I can see for being bothered by this data is “sour grapes”.
Eric, it seems that you have looked at one graph and draw a handful of superficial and incorrect conclusion.
This is not a thoughtless enterprise. I just spent the day at a sort of conference at which several groups of people defined and discussed numerous aspects of the economics, banking, production, wealth distribution and redistribution related to the current economic crisis. I’m not going to do you homework for you … I’m not going to summarize that event or anything else. But I will point out is this: A “skeptic” is not someone who encounters something new, does not recognize it, and then grows suddenly incredulous about it, and then accuses everyone else of being a bad skeptic because they understand it and you don’t.
I’m going to be quoting this for a while…
Incidentally, there seems to be a fundamental mode of stupidity where someone automatically assumes that if they don’t immediately understand something, it must be nonsense. Can we call this “narcissistic” or is it too common?
Politicians advance the interests of those who can most effectively influence them. Money buys influence. The cost of influencing politicians is one of the items which is not included in inflation estimates. Now do you see the problem?
Then, of course, there’s the large and growing body of evidence that highly unequal societies fair worse than more equal societies on a large range of metrics…
The right likes to cry about attempts to “redistribute wealth.” As the graph shows, the wealth has been distributing directly to the people who complain of being victimized by it.