If Accumulation of Wealth in the Top 1% of the Citizens is Good, Then Things Should be Great

September 10, 2009 by mike.

I recommend jumping to this website and reviewing the entire presentation. It’s well organized and presented. Nice use of graphs and text to tell the story effectively.

A simple solution to this problem (if you think it’s a problem) is to restructure the tax rates to include a steeply progressive top end. The simple fact that is shown by economic growth analysis is that steep top tax rates encourage growth and investment in infrastructure and industry that are good for all of us. An economy built on consumption and service jobs instead of an economy built on production of useful goods using sustainable methods is what we have today. We can do better.

clipped from www.cbpp.org Top 1 Percent of Americans Reaped Two-Thirds of Income Gains in Last Economic Expansion Income Concentration in 2007 Was at Highest Level Since 1928, New Analysis Shows Two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to the top 1 percent of U.S. households, and that top 1 percent held a larger share of income in 2007 than at any time since 1928, according to an analysis of newly released IRS data by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.[1] During those years, the Piketty-Saez data also show, the inflation-adjusted income of the top 1 percent of households grew more than ten times faster than the income of the bottom 90 percent of households. 2007 marked the fifth straight year in which income gains at the top outpaced those among the rest of the population. From 2002 to 2007, the average inflation-adjusted income of the top 1 percent of households rose 62 percent, compared to 4 percent for the bottom 90 percent of households (see Table 1).

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