I should start this homily on inequality by distinguishing income from wealth. Income is your annual wages or salary, as well as your earnings from a business, pension or government benefits such as Social Security, etc.
As the average U.S. worker’s real wages have stagnated for more than a decade, income disparity has become enormous. The bottom 90 percent of us average $30,000 a year, while the top 0.01 percent and 0.001 percent (about 1,400 taxpayers) rake in average annual incomes of $35.1 million and $152 million, respectively.
Meanwhile, even mediocre CEOs pocket many millions a year, and the greediest Wall Street hucksters annually amass more than $1 billion in booty. Until relatively recently, the ethical standard was for workers to gain a proportionate share of the income growth we generate. But in the last dozen years, the rich have been gobbling more and more of the total income pie, so the bottom half of Americans now get only 14 percent.
View the complete November 17 article by Jim Hightower on the National Memo website here.
Every summer, Mike McClure looks at his income tax withholding. The Apple Valley man doesn’t want to give the government what he calls a “free loan” by having too much money withheld from his paycheck. He also doesn’t want to end up owing a bunch to the IRS when he files his taxes in April.