Number of the Day

19.3%: The percentage of total household income in 2012 pulled in by the top 1% of earners in the US, which represents the largest wealth gap among earners in the nation's recorded history.
The top 1% of earners in the U.S. pulled in 19.3% of total household income in 2012, which is their biggest slice of total income in more than 100 years, according to a an analysis by economists at the University of California, Berkeley and the Paris School of Economics at Oxford University.

The richest Americans haven't claimed this large of a slice of total wealth since 1927, when the group claimed 18.7%.

...In a separate analysis, [prominent wealth and income researcher Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley] found the top 1% of earnings posted 86% real income growth between 1993 and 2000. Meanwhile, the real income growth of the bottom 99% of earnings rose 6.6%.
The richest USians believe the recovery has been successful, because it has been successful for them.

As for the rest of us...

image of a fake newspaper reading: 'Invisible hand gives ironic finger to local workforce: After massive layoffs at the local bootstrap factory, workers facing foreclosure are failing to appreciate the irony of their circumstances...'

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