Why a Meaningful Boost for Those at the Bottom Requires Help From the Top
But even raising middle-class wages probably wouldn’t be enough to offset the recent gains at the top. Since 1970, the best five-year run of income growth for the bottom 90 percent of families came between 1994 and 1999, when the group’s income rose by 14.1 percent, adjusting for population growth. If the bottom 90 percent had enjoyed the same run of income gains between 2009 and 2014, they would have collectively earned $683 billion during that time — almost identical to the $682 billion that the top 10 percent pulled in. And that would have been with the best income growth in almost two generations. (The actual increase in income for the bottom 90 percent was $79 billion.)
.. . Between 1992, the last full year of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, and 2000, the last full year of Bill Clinton’s, the average income of families in the bottom 90 percent grew by a seemingly impressive 15.4 percent. But the average income of families in the top 10 percent grew by over 50 percent. (The average income of the top 1 percent nearly doubled.) Inequality between the bottom 90 percent and the top 10 percent increased substantially.
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Or, put differently: The Clinton years had very impressive economic growth over all, some of which benefited families in the bottom 90 percent. But a majority of the growth benefited those in the top 10 percent, who took home nearly two-thirds of all the income gains as a group.
.. They make that argument not just because there’s no precedent in the past 45 years for a rate of growth that would raise everyone else’s income rapidly enough to narrow the income gap, but also because they believe rapid growth for the very affluent precludes rapid growth for everyone else.