Washington: In US, the gap between rich and poor has been widening lately. But some new numbers from the Congressional Budget Office put the issue into stark relief and the report shows that only top 1 percent elite class has been enjoying priviliges in US.
According to a new Congressional Budget Office report released, since 1979 the average, after-tax income of the top one percent of American households has risen 275 percent.Meanwhile, for the poorest one-fifth of the country, it’s gone up just 18 percent. And for the biggest slice of “middle class” America — the three-fifths of homes between the top and bottom 20% — incomes have risen just 40%.
All those numbers are inflation adjusted and only brings the data up to 2007, before the crisis that led to our current great recession.
One reason for the growing gap, the report said, is the impact of government transfer programs. Back in 1979, the poorest 20 percent of the population received 50 percent of all government transfers. By 2007, that had dropped to 35 percent — thanks largely to increases in spending on Social Security and unemployment benefits, which aren’t focused exclusively on poor households.
The report also underlines how the good times of the last 30 years were good mostly for the wealthiest among us. The top 1 percent receives about 17 percent of all income in this country, a number that has doubled since 1979.
Again, the new data is not shocking, but could provide a boost of energy and momentum to the Occupy Wall Street protestors that faced increased resistance in recent days, especially outside New York.
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