Sunday, December 23, 2012

The Unequal State of America: The economics paper that rattled Washington


WASHINGTON, D.C. | Tue Dec 18, 2012 7:12am EST


(Reuters) - The work of government economists is often so dry that the public never hears of it. And then there's the work of Thomas Hungerford.

An employee of the Congressional Research Service, Hungerford in 2011 published a paper that found that after-tax income inequality rose 11.2 percent between 1996 and 2006. Rising capital gains and dividends among the wealthy were the main driver of the widening gap, he concluded, accounting for 72 percent of the increase. Tax cuts, he found, accounted for the rest. The cuts had an especially big impact because income from capital gains surpassed salaries for the top 1 percent of earners over that period.
 

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