The Rich Are Rebounding Nicely, Thank You Very Much

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The wealthy took a big hit during the Great Recession, but have they recovered since then? In a word, yes. Emmanuel Saez updates his statistics for income gains among the rich and the rest:

Top 1% incomes grew by 11.6% while bottom 99% incomes grew only by 0.2%. Hence, the top 1% captured 93% of the income gains in the first year of recovery…It is likely that this uneven recovery has continued in 2011 as the stock market has continued to recover…This suggests that the Great Recession will only depress top income shares temporarily and will not undo any of the dramatic increase in top income shares that has taken place since the 1970s.

The chart below shows income gains among top earners. Even there, recovery has been uneven. Income rebounded nicely for the top 1%, but that’s about it. Even the merely well off, those with incomes over $100,000, gave back some of the small gains of the past couple of years. As with past recessions, the very richest took the steepest hit at first, but within a few years they’ll probably bounce back to even higher peaks than before. Mike Konczal has more here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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