Source: Talking Points Memo

At the request of the Senate Finance Committee, the Congressional Budget Office has produced a report analyzing trends in the distribution of household income from 1979 until 2007 — just before the economy fell off a cliff.

The results will be familiar to economists and policy wonks, but they’re eye-popping. These charts and graphs tell a story of a massive income growth in the Reagan and post-Reagan years, and particularly during the George W. Bush administration — but only for the famous 1 percenters.

The report includes several graphs verifying what many in the Occupy Wall Street movement have been echoing for a while: a disturbing trend in income disparity.

 

From the report:

1. From 1979 to 2007, real (inflation-adjusted) average household income, measured after government transfers and federal taxes, grew by 62 percent.
2. For the 1 percent of the population with the highest income, average real after-tax household income grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007
3. As a result of that uneven income growth, the distribu-tion of after-tax household income in the United States was substantially more unequal in 2007 than in 1979:  The share of income accruing to higher-income house-holds increased, whereas the share accruing to other households declined. In fact, between 2005 and 2007, the after-tax income received by the 20 percent of the population with the highest income exceeded the after-tax income of the remaining 80 percent.
4. This Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis finds that, over the past three decades, the distribution of income in the United States has become increasingly dispersed—in particular, the share of income accruing to higher-income households has increased, whereas theshare accruing to other households has declined.

 

Link:

CBO – Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007