What Did You Do With Your $59?

The ways that the parasitic rich cheat, steal and generally make economic survival impossible for the 99 percent are infinite.

Under the Mountain Bunker:

Average income rose just $59 from 1966 to 2011 for the bottom 90 percent once those incomes were adjusted for inflation… the top 10 percent fared much better, according to a new study of tax data from David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize winner: In 2011 the average AGI of the vast majority fell to $30,437 per taxpayer, its lowest level since 1966 when measured in 2011 dollars. The vast majority averaged a mere $59 more in 2011 than in 1966. For the top 10 percent, by the same measures, average income rose by $116,071 to $254,864, an increase of 84 percent over 1966.

[...] The biggest driver in that disparity, Cay Johnston wrote, was not that the rich were working harder, “but the shift of income from labor to capital and changes in federal income, gift, and estate tax rules.” Indeed, the estate tax has been eased over recent decades and federal income taxes have become more favorable to the wealthy thanks to breaks for investment income. A recent study, in fact, found that the capital gains tax cut, which benefits the wealthy but does virtually nothing for everyone else, was “by far” the biggest driver in the growth of American income inequality.

Other important facts: 

• One study found that pay for chief executives increased 127 times faster than worker pay over the last 30 years.
• Official data has shown worker wages stagnating since the 1970s. 
• American income inequality now rivals rates from countries like the Ivory Coast and Pakistan.
• the rising inequality has left the bottom 95 percent of Americans saddled with more debt than ever before.

(via ThinkProgress)

David Atkins:

Conservative shills like to point out that the wealthy are paying a bigger share of the overall tax burden than ever. That is true. But the difference between their previous share of the burden, and their overall share of the wealth isn't even close to comparable. They're paying a slightly greater share of the burden--but that's to be expected when their share of the wealth has increased two-thousandfold compared to everyone else.

And these statistics only look at the top 10%. The top 1% is making exponentially more than the rest of the 9% under them. And the top tenth of a percent is doing exponentially better than the rest of the one percent.

The country isn't broke. It's just that a small portion of the country's people have basically looted all the wealth of the last 50 years.

Ideally, that looting would be illegal in its own right. But if we give conservatives the benefit of the doubt and say that it would be too economically restrictive to attempt to control how much these people are taking away from the rest of the economy, then the second-best alternative we have under the circumstances is to redistribute a greater portion of those ill-gotten gains to create better jobs and social services for people whose incomes have been artificially constrained.

What we should under no circumstances be doing is cutting the safety net while allowing these thieves to walk away with all their loot