Wealth Inequality in America 2012!!

Four years after the Great Recession ended and the recovery began, millions of Americans continue to struggle with high unemployment, low labor force participation and stagnant wage growth. But according to a new report from inequality researchers Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, life at the top of the income distribution has rarely been better.

Last year, the richest 1 percent of households took home nearly a quarter (22.5 percent) of every dollar earned in the United States—a larger percentage of the economic pie than at any other time since before the stock market crash of 1929 or the financial crisis in 2007–2008.

Even more shocking is the fact that, for the first time ever, the top 10 percent earned more than half (50.4 percent) of the total national income—the highest recorded level of inequality since the government began taxing income in 1913.

Such an incredible increase in inequality comes after years in which nearly every dollar in income growth went to only the wealthiest Americans.

According to the latest data, incomes for the richest 1 percent of households soared 31.4 percent between 2009 and 2012—equal to 95 percent of all new income gains. Only 5 percent of growth went to the bottom 99 percent of earners, whose incomes increased just 0.4 percent.

Those numbers, updated last week, confirm the current recovery has been the weakest and the most unequal in living memory—a fact made even more remarkable considering the previous two economic expansions under former presidents Clinton and George W. Bush were far from egalitarian. From 1993 to 2000, real incomes for the top 1 percent grew five times faster than the bottom 99 percent; from 2002 to 2007, they grew nine times faster.