The super-rich are different from you and me, and that's precisely the plan

a LOT different...

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank, compared the latest data ... to comprehensive reports on income trends from the Congressional Budget Office. Every way it sliced the data, it found a striking share of total income concentrated at the top of the income ladder as of 2004.

• The top 10 percent of households had 46 percent of the nation's income, their biggest share in all but two of the last 70 years.

• The top 1 percent of households had 19.5 percent (see graph).

• The top one-tenth of 1 percent of households actually received nearly half of the increased share going to the top 1 percent.

These disparities seem large, and they are. (Though the latest available data is from 2004, there are virtually no signs that the basic trend has changed since then.) The top 1 percent held a bigger share of total income than at any time since 1929, except for 1999 and 2000 during the tech stock bubble. But what makes today's disparities particularly brutal is that unlike the last bull market of the late 1990's - when a proverbial rising tide was lifting all boats - the rich have been the only winners lately. According to an analysis by Goldman Sachs, for most American households - the bottom 60 percent - average income grew by less than 20 percent from 1979 to 2004, with virtually all of those gains occurring from the mid- to late 1990's. Before and since, real incomes for that group have basically flatlined.

The best-off Americans are not only winning by an extraordinary margin right now. They are the only ones who are winning at all.

teresa tritch, in this past wednesday's nyt, penned an op-ed entitled "the rise of the super-rich" (reprinted here in truthout)... in addition to presenting the above stats, she makes an initial observation that i vehemently disagree with...

President Bush has yet to acknowledge the true state of affairs, though it's at the root of his failure to convince Americans that the good times are rolling.

The president's lack of attention may be misplaced optimism, or it could be political strategy. Acknowledging what's happening would mean having to rethink his policies, not exactly his strong suit.

it would be exceedingly foolish and politically suicidal for bush to acknowledge the "true state of affairs..." after all, this is precisely the state of affairs he and his criminal posse have devoted themselves to since scotus affirmed their silent coup d'etat on 12 december 2000... there is neither reason nor incentive to "rethink his policies" because the policies are working just fine... the intended, hoped-for results are amply demonstrated by the statistics...

(thanks to the unknown candidate...)

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