Fixing the Deficit by Getting Help From the Top 1%
More "spam". It will never ennnnndddddd! lol
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-f..._b_850655.html
Some recent reports show that those at the top of the income and wealth ladder have done extremely well in the last decades. Hardly a day goes by without some economist discussing and analyzing the huge disparity in wealth between the rich and the rest of society. Joseph Stiglist, the Nobel Prize winning economist, has written an article in the latest Vanity Fair entitled "Of the 1%, By the 1%, For the 1%." The article discusses the enormous and growing inequality in wealth in this country, which has largely been the result of the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980's and the Bush tax cuts of 2001. Stiglitz points out that in the last 25 years, the top 1% have doubled their percentage of yearly income. In the period from 1976 to 2007, while national income has increased by about 60%, the income of the top 1% has increased by 275%. As of 2008, the top 1% received over 20% of the total income earned by all Americans.
When one examines wealth, instead of income, the top 1% do even better. In 1970, the top 1% owned 20% of the nation's wealth. In 2007, they owned 34.6% of the total wealth, according to a study (the Survey of Consumer Finances) prepared by the Federal Reserve Board. A leading scholar on wealth inequality, Professor Edward Wolff of Bard College, has argued that a truer measure of the wealth of the top 1% is their ownership of easily disposable assets, that is, the net worth of a household, minus the equity in owner-occupied housing. If one eliminates the value of a family's owner occupied home (the basic source of wealth for the bottom 50% of the country), the percentage of non-home wealth owned by the top 1% -- stocks, bonds, other real estate, businesses -- increases to about 42.7%. The top 1% own over 60% of financial securities and 62.5% of business equity.
