U.S. INCOME GAP GETS WIDER IN 2005

This is from a New York Times article describing a data analysis by Professor Emmanuel Saez of the University of California Berkeley and Professor Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics:

• Income inequality grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans — those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 — receiving their largest share of national income since 1928.
  
• The top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000, also reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression.
  
• While total reported income in the United States increased almost 9 percent in 2005, the most recent year for which such data is available, average incomes for those in the bottom 90 percent dipped slightly compared with the year before, dropping $172, or 0.6 percent.
  
• The gains went largely to the top 1 percent, whose incomes rose to an average of more than $1.1 million each, an increase of more than $139,000, or about 14 percent.
  
• The top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans.
  
• Per person, the top 300,000 Americans received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980.
  
• The top 10 percent of Americans collected 48.5 percent of all reported income in 2005. That is an increase of more than 2 percentage points over the previous year and up from roughly 33 percent in the late 1970s. The peak for this group was 49.3 percent in 1928.
  
• The top 1 percent received 21.8 percent of all reported income in 2005, up significantly from 19.8 percent the year before and more than double their share of income in 1980. The peak was in 1928, when the top 1 percent reported 23.9 percent of all income.
  
• The top tenth of a percent reported an average income of $5.6 million, up $908,000, while the top one-hundredth of a percent had an average income of $25.7 million, up nearly $4.4 million in one year.