CBO Report Shows Rich Got Richer, As Did Most Americans: View

In the political and economic climate created by consistently high unemployment and shaken by the Occupy Wall Street movement, last week’s Congressional Budget Office report on trends in U.S. household income had the effect of pouring kerosene on a bonfire.

The report’s most striking finding, that “for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income, average real after-tax household income grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007,” led to apocalyptic predictions not just from those at Zuccotti Park but also from the likes of Vice President Joe Biden’s former chief economist, Jared Bernstein, who insists that “such concentration of income is unsustainable in a democratic society.”