More and More in Their Hands

Here is how Republican economics are affecting you. I am doing better than most Americans and even I am beginning to feel the impact of this war on the middle class.

The richest one percent of Americans earned a postwar record of 21.2 percent of all income in 2005, up from 19 percent a year earlier, reflecting a widening income disparity among different classes in the nation, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing new Internal Revenue Service data.

The data showed that the fortunes of the bottom 50 percent of Americans are worsening, with that group earning 12.8 percent of all income in 2005, down from 13.4 percent the year before, the paper said.

It said that while the IRS data goes back only to 1986, academic research suggests that the last time wealthy Americans had such a high percentage of the national income pie was in the 1920s.

There was something about the end of 1920s that kind of bodes ill for our continued prosperity even if it is going down. We'll just have to wait and see what happens but there are signs that the wolves are circling.