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  Off-the-charts income gains for super-rich
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ContributorPatrick 
Last EditedPatrick  Apr 12, 2011 12:53am
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CategoryBlog Entry
AuthorZachary Roth
MediaWebsite - Yahoo News
News DateFriday, April 8, 2011 06:00:00 AM UTC0:0
DescriptionIn recent years, we've been hit with a barrage of statistics, charts, and even full-length books, documenting how inequality is on the rise in America.

But very few of them capture what's happened over the last 30 years or so as well as this image:



Put together by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington think tank, the chart is pretty self-explanatory. It shows that the 30 years following the Second World War were a time of broadly shared prosperity: Income for the bottom 90 percent of American households roughly kept pace with economic growth.

But over the last 35 years, there's been an abrupt shift: Total growth has slowed marginally, but the real change has been in how the results of that growth are distributed. Now, the bottom 90 percent have seen their income rise only by a tiny fraction of total growth, while income for the richest 1 percent has exploded by upwards of 275 percent.
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