Matt Stoller “Obama Accelerated the Growth of Inequality”

Matt Stoller of the Roosevelt Institute posted a pretty damning blog about the Obama administration’s economic policies at Naked Capitalism. According to the data Stoller presents in his post the 99% should perhaps be occupying the White House instead of Wall st.:

“Under Bush, the 1% captured a disproportionate share of the income gains from the Bush boom of 2002-2007.  They got 65 cents of every dollar created in that boom, up 20 cents from when Clinton was President.  Under Obama, the 1% got 93 cents of every dollar created in that boom.  That’s not only more than under Bush, up 28 cents.  In the transition from Bush to Obama, inequality got worse, faster, than under the transition from Clinton to Bush.  Obama accelerated the growth of inequality.

The data set is excellent, it’s from the IRS and it’s extremely detailed.  This yawing gap of inequality isn’t an accident, and it’s not just because of Republicans.  It’s a set of policy choices.”

Read more here.

Obama’s Economic Recovery for the 1%

The economy has supposedly been in recovery for two years now and President Obama never misses an opportunity to talk up that recovery but as it turns out the wealthy are the ones doing all the recovering.

In 2010, the first full year since the end of the Great Recession, the top 1 percent of Americans took in 93 percent of all the income gains that year, leaving the other 7 percent of gains to trickle down to the other 99% of U.S. workers.

Emmanuel Saez, a Berkeley economist, co-created a resource called the World Top Incomes Database. Saez and his colleagues crunched the data on income growth from 2010, the most recent year available, and found that it was incredibly, and unfortunately predictably, one sided.

While much of the country is struggling to maintain, with a growing number of people on the verge of poverty or already there, the rich continue to get richer.

Income for most workers has barely risen in 3 decades, while the top 1 percent’s income has almost triple. Economists and other experts say that could be the result of any number of factors, including the decline of labor unions and tax policies such as the Bush tax cuts, which were extended by Obama, that favor the wealthy.

A 2011 study states that income inequality is a major barrier to economic growth.