Study Says America’s Income Gap Widest Since Great Depression

The gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent is growing, according to an analysis of IRS figures by an international group of university economists, and it hasn’t been so wide since 1928.

The incomes of the very wealthiest 1 percent of Americans increased by 31.4 percent from 2009 to 2012. By contrast, the bottom 99 percent saw their earnings in the same period go up by just 0.4 percent. In 2012, the top 1 percent collected 19.3 percent of all household income and the top 10 percent took home a record 48.2 percent of total earnings.

The result, according to the analysis by economists from the University of California, Berkeley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University, who looked at 1913 onward, is the broadest income gap between super-rich and everyone else since just before the Great Depression.

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