CHART: How The 1934 Recovery Benefited The 99 Percent, While 2010's Benefited The Rich [View all]
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/03/16/446102/chart-1934-2010-recovery-rich/
In 2010, as the nation slowly ground its way from Great Recession to recovery, 93 percent of national income gains went to the richest 1 percent of Americans. As Reuterss David Cay Johnston pointed out today, this makes the 2010 recovery quite different from the recovery that followed the Great Depression, as then, income gains were widely shared by the population, not concentrated at the very top:
The 1934 economic rebound was widely shared, with strong income gains for the vast majority, the bottom 90 percent.
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National income gained overall in 2010, but all of the gains were among the top 10 percent. Even within those 15.6 million households, the gains were extraordinarily concentrated among the super-rich, the top one percent of the top one percent.
Just 15,600 super-rich households pocketed an astonishing 37 percent of the entire national gain.
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... to have a healthy, growing economy with good job creation we need much more of the wealth to be distributed to the middle and lower income groups so a greater proportion of it will be spent. We need demand for more products and services if we are to see good jobs growth. Under these conditions the very wealthy will actually do better - if they are invested in the right areas. With a growing economy the very wealthy, invested in the right areas will do better than in an economy where most of the people are effectively peasants without much money to spend.