The richest 0.1 percent collected 3.2% of all America's income in 1960, the year we elected Kennedy as president. In the third year of Obama's term, the top 0.1 percent collected 10.9% of America's income...
You say. but what does any of that mean to me?
Great question... simple answer? The percent of pie being divided by the rest of us is smaller. To this, the 1% will challenge: yes but the whole pie is much bigger. So let's look at that.
There are two ways ... One is to use straight lines over time to say: if top 0.1%'s income NOW eats 7.7% more of ALL income , how would that translate over a 55 year time span?
Answer is: average of 0.14 of one percent each year. You could take the national incomes over each of those 55 years, each times 0.14%(.0014) and then add all those products and get one total.
The other way calculates how much they took in 1960, and how much their recent take was in 2015, then comparing both to get a general idea.
The latter is more easier. 3.2% of $423 billion (yearly national income @ June 1960) is $16.3 billion. The 10.9% of $15.737 trillion (yearly national income @ December 2016) is $1.715 trillion... (No mistake: now is a good time to be in the top 0.1%. (and a bad time to be anywhere else).) Since the wealthy were doing quite well in 1960 (they wouldn't be wealthy otherwise) we can quickly track how much MORE our pie they are eating now, which to all intents and purposes should still be coming to us...
So what if we took the top 0.1% back down to 1960 percentage levels? This: that 3.2% rate at today's $15.737 trillion national income, would be: $503.5 billion. Instead of earning $1.7 trillion, the top 0.1 percent would in today's world, earn $503 billion, an amount incidentally more than the total national income of 1960. That precipitous drop from the ACTUAL $1.7 trillion incomed by the top zero point one percent in recent years, to the more fairer $503 billion, drops nearly $1.2 trillion.
How would that $1.2 trillion affect us if split between the 157 million (December 2015) of us working-Americans?
The potential exists for each of human worker to pocket an extra $7643 dollars a year. Every… Single… Human… Worker.
This is the single silver bullet answer to most our problems, one very simple to execute. Tax the top 0.1 percent that extra yearly $1.2 trillion, and use just part of that to build our infrastructure, benefiting all Americans either building or selling to those building. Use another part to pay off some debt.
Against this argument Norquistians have no rebuttal, despite 50 years of searching for an answer.. Very quickly they try to change the subject. If not allowed to do that, they find themselves forced to defend the indefensible, falling flat on their faces. Their tax-cutting position makes sense temporarily only when offered in a vacuum depleted and void of counter-arguments and historical fact.
The biggest tragedy across my lifetime is that this illustration and argument has never been taken up by any national media outlet, has never been expressed bluntly in the clear language every American can understand, has never been inserted into the American conversation. Americans are indeed being ripped off. They are being lied to as to by whom.