Colin Gordon at Dissent summarizes new national income statistics for America’s wealthiest, something that seems likely to worsen under Trump. Since Reagan, the US has been been edging toward income share levels not seen since before World War II.
The election of Donald Trump, and the daily infliction of another huckster, ideologue, paranoid, or unrepentant one-percenter cabinet appointment, has upended the politics of inequality. The defining issue of our time, not an insignificant source of Trump’s victory, is disappearing from the national political radar. So it is dismally appropriate, in the days between the appointments of Ben Carson at Housing and Urban Development and Andrew Puzder at Labor, that Thomas Piketty and colleagues have released updated and revised estimates of the share of national income going to top earners.