Tax Notes Study: Rich Getting Richer Poor Poorer

The highest earning Americans ($11.5 million or more) accounted for the biggest share EVER of the nation's income in 2007. Read "Striking it Richer" here. In contrast people making less than $30,000 lost income. Rationale for the millionaire's tax that Obama supports?

The wealthiest 15,000 households, those making more than $11.5 million a year, got a record 6.04 percent of the nation’s $8.7 trillion in income, according to the study by University of California-Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez. The previous year those households amassed 5.46 percent of the total, the tax data shows.

In Saez’s study, the richest Americans represent the top 0.01 percent of all households. In 1928, the year before the Great Depression began, the share of the nation’s income for this slice of households was 5.04 percent.

“This shows that 2007 was an incredibly good year for the super-rich,” Saez wrote in an update of a paper he publishes on his Web site. Saez didn’t immediately return a phone call and e-mail seeking further comment.

A separate analysis by the weekly journal Tax Notes suggested the poor got poorer in 2007. The share of all U.S. income made by the 66 million Americans who earn less than $30,000 a year shrank by 2.3 percent from 2006, a decline of $149 per taxpayer. Bloomberg