The only thing that’s recovered is the top 1% of income earners:
Emmanuel Saez, the Berkeley economist who (with Thomas Piketty, an economist at the École d’economie de Paris) first mapped the enormous 34-year run-up in income share for America’s top 1 percent, came up last year with a statistic that was widely quoted by people who care about rising income inequality. In 2010, the first year of economic recovery after the 2009-2010 recession, 93 percent of all pre-tax income gains went to the top 1 percent, which in that year meant any household making more than about $358,000. This was, I quipped at the time, a members-only recovery. No 99-percenters need apply.
Saez has now updated this statistic to include 2011. When you look at the economic recovery’s first two years, the top one percent (which by 2011 meant any household making more than about $367,000) captured 121 percent of all pre-tax income gains.
How is it even possible for the one percent to capture more than 100 percent of all income gains since the last recession? Looked at from one point of view, it’s not. It is enough to say that in 2010 and 2011 all of the recovery went to the one percent. If you were in the bottom 99 percent, as by definition nearly all of us are, you didn’t see a dime of that recovery.
And yet we keep voting in the same group of rascals election after election. I think that’s explainable only due to a perception that the only alternative is a different group of rascals.
Is the perception right or wrong?
Well, as I have argued, the Democrat/Republican thing is really a nothing issue…except to keep people from really paying attention to what is really going on. Keep in mind the Democrats have held considerable power over the last 5 years and yet we get this result.
So I’d say your perception is right.
You act like they are “taking it” from the other “classes”.
A typical marxist bit of rhetoric.
The reality is that the Democrats have been making war on the middle class, and have impoverished them. That would be the REAL middle class, those that run SMEs, not the fake middle clas of higher end union workers. THat is the deocrat party: The Rich, the unions, the rest of the Nomenklatura and the poor against the middle class.
The 99% agit-prop os Marxist hogwash. You want a recover, get the Democrats out of power across the board and undo all their thievery.
@Steve Verdon
It took me a long time to accept what was apparent. Each side is playing its adherents. At some point, the “scales fell from my eyes”, and there was no going back. For me, learning the truth about Tuskegee did it, but it is difficult for most people to question all that is assumed to be “the truth”.
@Hattip
… You want a recovery, get the Democrats out of power across the board and undo all their thievery.
The Republicans would never allow this to happen. Campaign donations require passionate supporters. Each party has about the same number of issues that generate campaign donations. Anybody who’s enthusiasm wanes is a heretic within their party.
It is interesting that one party rarely embraces the other party’s heretics. This could be an oversight, but I doubt it.
Many on the left love the European way of life. Maybe that’s why this country finds it kind of magical to follow in it’s footsteps. However, when you look at a country like France, it’s noted that in 2012 there was nary a quarter of growth to be seen causing the European GDP to take a nosedive.
Boy, does this sound like a familiar movie, or something! It begs the question as to what is the solution to such a confounding problem?
Well, we don’t have to worry about that happening here — at least for the next 4 years!