New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston is kind of an awesome dude. Yesterday, he dropped one of his customary bombshell reports:
[Earners of over $1 million/year,] who constitute less than a quarter of 1 percent of all taxpayers, reaped almost 47 percent of the total income gains in 2005, compared with 2000.
People with incomes of more than a million dollars also received 62 percent of the savings from the reduced tax rates on long-term capital gains and dividends that President Bush signed into law in 2003…
So less than one-quarter of one percent of all taxpayers took in almost 50 percent of the nation’s revenues revenue gain. And what about the little guy? Screwed, as you would suspect.
Americans earned a smaller average income in 2005 than in 2000, the fifth consecutive year that they had to make ends meet with less money…
Total income listed on tax returns grew every year after World War II, with a single one-year exception, until 2001, making the five-year period of lower average incomes and four years of lower total incomes a new experience for the majority of Americans born since 1945.
Mother Jones has written in the past about how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. We’ve also interviewed David Cay Johnston.
