If you are wondering why there is permanent French-bashing on the right wing, here's a graph that may explain some of it:
This is not really hot news, but it is becoming so stark (note that the above graph goes only to 1998 - the trends which are apparent there have only accelerated since) that even the Economist has taken notice and is worried that such inequalities are tearing the US apart (in this survey of US mobility, probably behind a subscription wall, published in their print edition two weeks ago).
But the reality is clear - income is increasingly going to the super rich in Anglo-saxon countries, but not in France (nor Germany or Japan I'd expect), and this is the real underlying basis to a number of ideological clashes.
Below the fold, a few more graphs taken from Piketty and Saez's ground-breaking study, which can be found here: INCOME INEQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES, 1913-1998 (PDF, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. CXVIII February 2003 Issue 1)
As a note, Piketty came to fame for his PhD dissertation on the same topic in France, which showed conclusively the major role that the estate tax played in ensuring decreasing inequality throughout this century in France, going through the full century of tax returns. He has used the same methodology based on tax returns for his study of US incomes.
The first graph shows the share of income for the richest 10%:
The second one shows that what has actually changed in recent years is the share of income for the top 1% only:
The graph for the top 0.01% (that would be about 30,000 people in the US) is even starker:
One of the thing that Piketty and Saez note in their study is that one of the major differences between France and the USA today is the growth in the past 30 years of a new category of high earners that get rich from their wage income and not from their capital incomes - fatcat CEOs, "master of the universe" traders and the like.
This graph shows the relative growth of CEO pay and "normal" wages (note the different scales on the two sides, and the fact that this is a logarithmic scale, i.e. increases are even larger than they appear below):
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I will let the Economist (in this section of the above mentioned survey, which included the graph posted above the fold) provide the conclusion:
This does not mean that America's meritocracy is a fake, or that nothing can be done. The country faced a similar rise in inequality in the early 20th century and rallied against it. President Roosevelt sought to save American capitalism from its own excesses so that "malefactors of great wealth" would not become a hereditary aristocracy.
Today, policy changes, such as reforming the way schools are financed, or giving federal help to poorer college students, would lessen social inequality. But for that to happen, American politicians and the public must first acknowledge that there is a problem. At the moment, they do not.
THAT's the job of the Democrats. Why do they need to be reminded, by the Economist, of all places???
