As Usual, the Unrich in America Continue to Tread Water

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


I commented briefly yesterday on the CBO’s latest report about the distribution of household income, but I didn’t get a chance to show you the main event: Income growth since the Reagan era. Here it is:

The nice thing about the CBO income estimates is that they’re pretty comprehensive. This one, for example, shows market income, which consists of labor income (including cash wages, health insurance, and the employer’s share of Social Security, Medicare, and federal unemployment insurance payroll taxes), business income, capital income (including capital gains), and retirement income. Other CBO income measures include government transfers, so you can get a good sense of how incomes are affected by social welfare programs.

As you can see, the market incomes of the rich bounce up and down a fair amount because they rely on volatile income sources like stocks and other investments. 2013 was not a good year for them—though we already know that they made up some of this ground in 2014 and 2015.

But for the unrich—which is, roughly speaking, everyone making less than $100,000 per year—nothing ever changes. During a period when real GDP per capita increased 77 percent, the income of the unrich has increased only 18 percent. That’s about half a percent per year, and all of it came from a single decade: 1993-2003. The rest of the time there’s been literally zero growth in the income of the unrich.

Economic anxiety may not be the real motivation for angry voters in this election, but it sure ought to be.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate