Source: Business Insider reprint from TheNation.com infographic.
A damning series of charts from Business Insider confirms what many of us have felt in our shrinking paychecks for decades. The income gap between the wealthiest one percent and the bottom 90 percent — typically referred to as the middle class — now exceeds the robber baron proportions of 1928 preceding the banking crash. Today, the super rich earn nearly 1,000 times the wage of the majority of Americans.
That gaping income disparity, trending upward since the 1980s, also accounts for two much more worrying realities. The marginal tax rate has dropped considerably for the wealthy and is now just 35 percent — nearly 60 percent lower than the WWII-era rate of 91 percent that ushered in America’s greatest economic period that was largely credited with creating the middle class.
Coinciding with the precipitous tax decline, the captains of industry (and celebrity) now own more than half of U.S. stocks, bonds and mutual funds. That surely explains much of the motive for watering down the Wall Street regulatory reform bill passed by Congress last week. What? Your meager IRA doesn’t come with a lobbyist on speed dial?
For a nation that prides itself on fair monetary policy and the universal capacity to better one’s economic status through smarts and hard work, we’ve got some long overdue reconciling of our perceptions of America’s promise for economic greatness and its present-day realities.
Read the rest of the wealth inequality charts and weep.
