Vol. 71/No. 19      May 14, 2007

Total income of the top 10 percent of U.S. households—those earning more than $100,000 a year—accounted for nearly half or 45.8 percent of all reported income in 2005. That’s more than 2 percentage points over 2004 and a 15 percent increase since the late 1970s.

Income of the top 300,000 households almost equaled that of the bottom 150 million—around half the U.S. population. The average total earnings of the latter fell 0.6 percent or by $172 each from the previous year.

The top 1 percent—incomes of more than $1.1 million—saw a whopping 14 percent increase between 2004 and 2005, an average $139,000 additional per household. The top tenth of a percent averaged $5.6 million, up by nearly a million, while the top one-hundredth of a percent averaged $25.7 million, an increase of nearly $4.4 million.

An April 4 New York Times editorial about the new data noted such gaps were last seen before the Great Depression.  
 
 
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