WASHINGTON — The top 1 percent of earners more than doubled their share of the nation’s income over the past three decades, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday in a new report. In addition, the report said, government policy has become less redistributive since the late 1970s, doing less to reduce the concentration of income. “The equalizing effect of federal taxes was smaller” in 2007 than in 1979, as “the composition of federal revenues shifted away from progressive income taxes to less-progressive payroll taxes,” the budget office said.
The office found that from 1979 to 2007, average inflation-adjusted after- tax income grew by 275 percent for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income. By contrast, for the poorest fifth of the population, average real after-tax household income rose 18 percent. And for the three-fifths of people in the middle of the income scale, the growth was just under 40 percent.
The New York Times
