America's Tilt to the Top: The Deepest Stats Yet

By Sam Pizzigati

October 29, 2011 - 7:35pm ET 

All sorts of federal agencies publish income inequality data. But only the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office directly takes on America's income inequality deniers.

Back in 1979, America’s most affluent 1 percent took home — after federal taxes — about the same share of the nation’s income as all the Americans in the bottom 20 percent. In 2007, Americans learned last week, the nation’s top 1 percent took home more income than America’s entire bottom 40 percent.
 

These new stats didn’t come from some scruffy Occupy Wall Street encampment. They came — in a blockbuster new report — from the buttoned-down number crunchers at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. And the portrait they paint essentially gives the Occupy movement’s most basic insight, that our top 1 percent has hijacked the nation, an official government imprimatur.