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Thursday, January 18, 2007
Income Inequality Continues Apace
The latest EPI Snapshot presents yet more data points on the trend in rising inequality. Lawrence Marshall and Jared Bernstein describe two notable measures of inequality growth:
(1) The share of corporate income going to the owners of capital
The most recent data (third quarter of 2006) reveal that owners of capital received 23.0% of all corporate income, the highest share since 1966. That means that the compensation of employees was at the lowest share in over 25 years.
and (2) the share of capital income going to the top 1% of the income scale
[T]hose in the top 1% of the income scale received 59.4 % of all the capital income in 2004 (CBO's latest data), up from 49.1% in 2000, 39.1% in 1989 and just 37.8% in 1979. The increase in the concentration of capital income to the upper 1% grew as quickly over the four-year period from 2000 to 2004 as over the preceding 11 years (1989-2000).
Posted by Craig Jennings
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