How the Rich Get Richer 3JAN12

THE rich get richer and the rest of us struggle along trying to make ends meet.....so why are so many of the 99% supporting gop / tea-bagger candidates who want to keep the status quo? From Mother Jones...

—By Kevin Drum

While we're all waiting for the Iowa straw poll to finish up, here are some new income inequality charts for you to munch on. These come from a new CRS report, and the first one shows where most of us get our income. For 80% of us, the answer is: almost all of it comes from ordinary wages and salaries. We get a grand total of 0.7% of our income from dividends and capital gains.
For the top 0.1%, it's flipped around. They get less than 20% of their income from ordinary wages and more than half from dividends and capital gains. So when Republicans eagerly insist on reducing or eliminating taxes on dividends and capital gains, this chart shows you who benefits. Most of us get nada, but the very rich benefit handsomely.

Got that? Onward, then. This next chart comes from Jared Bernstein, based on the same CRS report, and it shows how various kinds of income contributed to growing income inequality between 1996 and 2006. Overall, America's Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, increased by 0.057 points between 1996 and 2006. Of that increase, most comes from dividends and capital gains, which became a higher percentage of the pay of the rich, and taxes, which went down a lot for rich people.

There's more detail at the link, but you get the picture. For the rich, the amount of their income that comes from capital gains went up, while the taxes they paid on their capital gains went down. As a result, income inequality zoomed ever higher. Pretty sweet deal, no?

Winners and Losers From the Great Recession from Mother Jones 30JUN11

HERE'S a great article from Mother Jones showing the real winners from this last recession and no big surprise it is corporations come out on top guaranteeing the political whores on Capital Hill will keep receiving their back money as long as they keep all revenue increases out of any federal budget cap agreement.

So who's benefited and who hasn't from the current recovery following the Great Recession? I think you know the answer already, but just to make it official, here's a report from researchers at Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies:

Between the second quarter of 2009 and the fourth quarter of 2010, real national income in the U.S. increased by $528 billion. Pre-tax corporate profits by themselves had increased by $464 billion while aggregate real wages and salaries rose by only $7 billion or only .1%. Over this six quarter period, corporate profits captured 88% of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1% of the growth in real national income. The extraordinarily high share of national income (88%) received by corporate profits was by far the highest in the past five recoveries from national recessions.

Here it is in table format, in case you want to see comparisons to previous recessions and recoveries:

Plainly, what's needed to address this crisis is tax cuts for corporations and reduced federal spending on workers. But who will speak up for our downtrodden corporate sector? It is a vexing problem.
Via Economix.