In their book, "Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made The Rich Richer -- And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class", authors Jacob Hacker & Paul Pierson provide analysis into the groundbreaking research on wealth inequality conducted by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. I recommend the book, but in case you don't read it, I feel that the information is too relevant and useful for progressives for me to sit on.
By now, you're aware that we have a distributional problem in our economic structure. As an example, during the last economic expansion ('02-'07), 53% of all economic gains went to the top 1%. And in the current economic "recovery" over 90% of all economic gains have gone to the top 1%. That covers two administrations, one Republican and one Democratic. Bush and Obama have been in office while inequality skyrocketed. However, the trend precedes them both.
From 1979-2006, real household income rose by 50% overall. How was that income distributed? Laughably unequally. If you include government tax breaks/benefits and employer-sponsored benefits, the bottom fifth saw a 10% gain over those 27 years. But households had to work 400 more hours in 2006 than they did in 1979 in order to keep this meager increase. Without those 400 hours, the bottom fifth would have LOST money. By contrast, the top 1% saw a 260% increase from 1979-2006, up from an average of 337k in 1979 to 1.2 million in 2006.
Hacker & Pierson show what our economic class divisions would look like if the economic gains from 1979-2006 were spread equally across all groups. They broke it into two groups: Richistan & Broadland.
Richistan represents what our current situation is after 30 years of skewed distribution:
-The bottom fifth of households brought home 16k in 2006.
-The second fifth of households brought home 35k.
-The middle fifth of households brought home 52k.
-The third fifth of households brought home 73k.
-The 80-90th percentile of households brought home 100k.
-The 90-95th percentile of households brought home 132k.
-The 95th-99th percentile of households brought home 211k
-The top 1% of households brought home 1.2 million.
Meanwhile, in the lovely hypothetical Broadland, the distribution of household income gains from 1979-2006 would have been far more equal:
-The bottom fifth of households would have brought home 22k in 2006, a gain of 6k.
-The second fifth of households would have brought home 45k, a gain of 10k.
-The middle fifth of households would have brought home 64k, a gain of 12k.
-The 80-90th percentile of households would have brought home 106k, a gain of 6k.
-The 90th-95th percentile of households would have brought home 128k, a LOSS of 3k.
-The 95th-99th percentile of households would have brought home 181k, a LOSS of 30k.
-The top 1% of households would have brought home 506k, a LOSS of 694k.
The numbers are clear- Broadland would be better for 90% of households. Is there anyone reading this that feels 506k isn't enough to live on each year at the top?
So the question for progressives to think about for the next election is this: will our candidate try and turn Richistan into Broadland? Or will she be coming from Richistan with tall tales of entrepreneurs and carrot on a stick opportunities?
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