This Shouldn’t Surprise You If You’ve Been Paying Attention

Rich get massively richer under Bush.  The rest of us?  Not so much — in fact, we wound up giving our money to them:

Earlier this week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) updated its authoritative data series on household incomes (1979-2005).  The new data—highly regarded as a particularly complete source of information on this important topic—reveal a sharp increase in income inequality over the past few years.  In fact, the increase in income inequality (both pre- and post-tax) as measured by the change in the shares of income going to different income classes, was greater from 2003 to 2005 than over any other two-year period covered by the CBO data.  Over these years, an amazing $400 billion in pre-tax dollars was shifted from the bottom 95% of households to those in the top 5% (all income data in this report are inflation adjusted and in 2005 dollars).  In other words, had income shares not shifted as they did, the income of each of the 109 million households in the bottom 95% would have been $3,660 higher in 2005.

But of course if anybody talks about taxing the upper five percent, all hell breaks loose.