Here’s the headline of a story that appeared today on the Bloomberg website: “Top 1% Got 93% of Income Growth as Rich-Poor Gap Widened.” The story that followed contained the information that according to an estimate of the U.S. Census Bureau, last year while the bottom 99 percent of households in this country saw their earnings fall by 1.7 percent on average, the top one percent of households saw an income increase of 5.5 percent.
This story went on to cite a study by a University of California economist which found that the top one percent garnered 93 of all income growth in 2010, a year after the official so-called recovery began. Other studies have come up with similar numbers going back to the 1980s.
COW is Concentration Of Wealth. HIG is Huge Income Gap. Growing COWs, growing HIGs, are the fundamental reasons for economic discontent in this country. And by-the-by, the fundamental reasons our overall economy is not just weak but can not significantly improve any time soon.
How to readjust COWs and HIGs to levels that prevailed between the 1950s and 1970s should therefore be what the big debate tomorrow night is all about. The subject is unlikely to come up, however. Which is really, really sad.