An American Anti-Magnificat

Source: Progressive Christians Uniting

The Working Poor: The IRS says that the bottom fifth of U.S. taxpayers–some 26 million–made under $11,000 in 2004 and had an average income of $5,743–up 2.4 percent from 2000. A “taxpayer” can be a single individual or a couple with children, meaning that the poorest 60 million Americans–everyone covered by these 25 million tax returns–enjoyed an average income of less than $7 per day per person. (The official poverty line in 2004 was $27 for a single adult below retirement age.)

The Very Wealthy: Incomes at the very top–some 300,000 households–also slipped a bit between 2000 and 2004, but this group still reported significantly more income than the poorest 120 million Americans earned in 2004. The elite group increased its share of national income substantially over the period from 1979–the oldest year studied by the IRS. (In 1979 the top households received “only” about a third of the income of the big group at the bottom.)


A Disturbing Pattern: We often hear consoling numbers about overall income growth in the U.S., but this aggregate growth masks a horrendously uneven distribution. For example…

*the bottom 60 percent of taxpayers made 95 cents in 2004 for each dollar they made ini 1979: that is, over a period of 25 years their real income actually fell

*the next best off group–those between the 60th and 80th rungs on the ladder–moved upward over the period, but only by two cents, earning $1.02 in 2004 for every dollar they had earned in 1979

*only those in the top 5 percent had significant gains: those between the 95 and 99th rungs on the ladder saw their income rise by 53 percent over the period

*a full third of the aggregate growth in national income went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers–and more than half of that to the top tenth of 1 percent. Members of this super-elite group were making $3.48 in 2004 for every dollar they made in 2000. Moreover, the Bush tax cuts for the superrich meant that for each inflation-adjusted dollar they had after taxes in 1979, their 2004 equivalent was $3.94.

Mind you, this changes reflect income distribution in the United States, not wealth distribution, which is even more grotesquely unequal.