![]() ![]() ![]() The economy remains depressed for most wage-earning families. But the richest 10 percent of households own about 90 percent of the stock, expanding both their net worthĪnd their incomes when they cash out or receive dividends. About half of households hold stock, directly or through vehicles like pension accounts. More generally, richer households have disproportionately benefited from the boom in the stock market during the recovery, with the Dow Jones industrial average more than doubling in value since it bottomed outĮarly in 2009. The tax changes coming, many companies gave large dividends and investors cashed out.īut the economists noted that the trends looked the same for income figures including and excluding realized capital gains - implying that the temporary tax moves were not the only reason the top 1 percentĭid so well relative to everyone else in 2012. That deal included a number of tax increases on wealthy Americans, including bumping up levies on investment income. Congress made a last-minute deal to avoid the expiration of all of the Bush-era tax cuts in January. That increase is probably in part due to one-time factors. The income share of the top 1 percent of earners in 2012 returned to the same level as before both the Great Recession and the Great Depression: just above 20 percent, jumping to about 22.5 percent in 2012 from Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in his analysis of the data. “These results suggest the Great Recession has only depressed top income shares temporarily and will not undo any of the dramatic increase in top income shares that has taken place since the 1970s,” Wages for many blue- and white-collar workers. High stock prices, rising home values and surging corporate profits have buoyed the recovery-era incomes of the most affluent Americans, with the incomes of the rest still weighed down by high unemployment and stagnant The figures underscore that even after the recession the country remains in a new Gilded Age, with income as concentrated as it was in the years that preceded the Depression of the 1930s, if not more so. The top 1 percent took more than one-fifth of the income earned by Americans, one of the highest levels on record since 1913, when the government instituted an income tax. The top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the country’s total income in 2012, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting the relevant data a century ago, according to an updated study by the prominent economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.
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