According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuael Saez, confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90% of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148%, the income of the top 0.1% rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01% rose 599%. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they're not an artifact of the stock-market bubble.) Thomas Piketty warns that current policies will eventually create "a class of rentiers in th U.S., whereby a small group of wealthy but untalented children controls vast segments of the US economy and penniless, talented children simply can't compete." Download entire opinion article in PDF format.
