Forbes on Inequality

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Dec 10 08:14:48 PST 1999


Brett Knowlton wrote:


>The thrust of the Forbes article was it is only the infusion of poor
>immigrants into the country which causes the statistics you see about how
>the income of the poorest 1/5 has eroded by x% (whatever it is).

But income polarization in the U.S. isn't just a story of the bottom 20% - it's mostly a story of the top 5% thriving while everyone else is lucky to be stagnant. Here's the share of household income by quintile, with the top quintile broken down into the richest 5% and the next 15%. And these Census figures understate incomes at the high end.

by quintile top quintile, breakdown

--------------------------------------------- -----------------------

poorest 2nd middle 4th top 80-94 top 5% 1967 4.0 10.8 17.3 24.2 43.8 26.3 17.5 1970 4.1 10.8 17.4 24.5 43.3 26.7 16.6 1980 4.3 10.3 16.9 24.9 43.7 27.9 15.8 1990 3.9 9.6 15.9 24.0 46.6 28.0 18.6 1998 3.6 9.0 15.0 23.2 49.2 27.8 21.4

1998 income $9,223 23,288 38,967 60,266 127,529 95,944 222,283

Doug



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