A repackaging of Culturekiosque.com, a web site where I'm one of the editors-- this is an experiment, let's see how it looks.
Tax Data Show Richest 1 Percent Took a Hit in 2008, But Income Remained Highly Concentrated at the Top — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
An analysis of recently released IRS data on pre-tax income by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez [1] shows that:
- The average income of the top 1 percent of households fell by 20 percent from 2007 to 2008, after adjusting for inflation, wiping out almost half of the gains this group achieved between 2002 and 2007 (see Figure 1).
- The average income of the bottom 90 percent of households fell 7 percent from 2007 to 2008, in inflation-adjusted dollars, the largest one-year drop for this group since 1938. The loss in 2008 more than wiped out the increase from 2002 to 2007, leaving the average income for the bottom 90 percent of households at its lowest level since 1996.
