Some Income Statistics

I came across these statistics that were in a NY Times article based on data and research by Professor Emmanuel Saez of the University of California-Berkeley and Professor Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics.

According to these two professors, and this is for the year 2005 only, the top one-tenth of one percent of Americans had almost as much income during the year as the bottom 150 million Americans!!! The top one tenth of one percent comprises only 300,000 people, but they received 440 times as much income in 2005 as the average person in the bottom half of the income scale. This figure almost doubles the income disparity from 1980.

Overall income rose by 9% during 2005, but the average income for the bottom 90% of Americans actually fell by $172 compared to 2004.