Purpose of any Company is Profits - screw the workers

[sugarpop]

The New York Times reported Thursday on an analysis of income tax data carried out by Prof. Emmanuel Saez of University of California-Berkeley and Prof. Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, well known for their work on income inequality.

Their research indicates that in 2005 the top 1 percent of all Americans, some 3 million people, received their largest share of the national income since 1928: 21.8 percent, up from 19.8 percent only the year before—a 10 increase percent in one year. The incomes of this group, those making more than $348,000 a year, rose to an average of more than $1.1 million each, an increase of over $139,000, or about 14 percent.

The top 10 percent of the population carried away some 48.5 percent of all reported income in the US in 2005—also the highest percentage since 1928, on the eve of the Depression—an increase of 2 percent from 2004, and up from 33 percent of the reported total in the late 1970s.

The top tenth of 1 percent (300,000 people) and top one-hundredth of 1 percent (30,000 people) enjoyed the greatest increases of all. “The top tenth of a percent reported an average income of $5.6 million, up $908,000, while the top one-hundredth of a percent had an average income of $25.7 million, up nearly $4.4 million in one year,” according to David Cay Johnston’s article.

The top one-tenth of 1 percent of the US population had nearly as much income in 2005 as the bottom 150 million Americans. Each of those 300,000 individuals received 440 times as much income as the average person on the bottom half of the economic ladder, “nearly doubling the gap from 1980.”

While total reported income rose almost 9 percent in the US during the course of 2005, average incomes for the bottom 90 percent of the population actually dropped, by $172 compared with the year before, or 0.6 percent.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/ma...inco-m30.shtml