If Your Income Grew Like the One-Percenters' Income Grew

Because given the fact that the income of the rich parasites consists entirely of productivity stolen from actual workers, it damn well should have.

Kevin Drum:

Do you ever wonder what your income would be like if it had grown as fast as the average investment banker's since 1960? Well, wonder no more! Click here, enter your current salary, and our handy-dandy calculator will tell you how much you'd be making today if ordinary incomes had gone up as fast as the top 1 percent.

Now, before you ask, no, it's not realistic to think that everyone's income could rise as fast as the superwealthy's has. Still, this calculator provides a concrete sense of what a 270 percent increase really means. When you hear that the head of Goldman Sachs used to make $20 million and now makes $75 million, it just seems like two ginormous numbers. When you find out that a similar growth rate means that you would be making, say, $150,000 instead of $50,000, it kind of brings it all home.