I actually posted such a number above. In 1983, the top 1% of the population had 33.8% of the wealth. In 2004, they had 34.3% - virtually unchanged. And since the recession hit the wealthy very hard, my guess is that their share is now lower than it was 25 years ago.
The notion that the middle class is shrinking is largely not true. Or rather, the unstated part of the claim that the middle class is shrinking is that the rich are taking everything, and the middle class is being pushed down into the lower classes. In fact, the middle class is slightly smaller today than it has been in the past, but that’s mostly because people have moved UP out of the middle class, not down. And that’s only if you measure the middle class by hard income categories, rather than by characteristic measures.
This graph is a good indicator of what’s been going on. The lines represent the various income quintiles, showing whether they have grown over time. You can see that the percentage of people in the lower income quintiles is not getting much bigger - if there’s a trend there, it’s only worth a percentage point or two. The ‘gap between the rich and poor’ has certainly grown substantially, and that’s what the left likes to go on about, but if you examine the chart you’ll see that it’s not the result of wealth clustering at the top. Rather, the lowest two quintiles have stayed relatively fixed, while everyone else, including the middle class quintiles, have improved. In other words, the income share has spread out more across all but the lowest quintiles. This increases the gap between top and bottom, but only because of clustering at the top, but because of wider variance of income across the top 80% of the population.
So the best description of what has happened is that the lower classes are not growing, but they are being left behind by everyone else as people from the middle classes on up are improving.
Median household income, in constant dollars, has risen from $35,000 in 1965 to $46,000 in 2005. And while it did decline slightly from 1996 to 2003, it has been rising since.
In addition, much depends on how you define the middle class. If you insist on simply using income brackets, you can see some shrinkage (but again, mostly because of movement upwards, not downwards). But if you ask what the various income classes are really supposed to represent, you get something like this:
Poor - unable to sustain themselves without societal aid. Lacking in the basic necessities or conveniences common to everyone else.
Middle Class - Self-reliant, but still having to work for a living. Capable of living the ‘American Dream’ of home ownership, sending the kids to college, owning good personal transportation and access to recreation and vacationing to desirable places.
Upper Class - Capable of living a high lifestyle without the need to work. Availability of personal servants to take care of mundane chores.
By those definitions, the middle class has grown much bigger in the past few decades. Because many of the people considered ‘rich’ now are the working wealthy - engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc. They still live middle class lives, although with the trappings of luxury. And the ‘poor’ have access to the things that would have been considered middle class just a couple of decades ago - air conditioning, private cars, homes, computers, televisions, DVD players, automatic washing machines and dishwashers, etc.
This Cite will give you your answer, and given what you obviously think the answer is, you’re in for a surprise.
The share of wealth held by the top 1% in America in 1922 was 36.7%. The share of wealth held by the top 1% actually peaked in 1929, when it was 44.2%. The low point was actually 1976, when the top 1% had 19.9% of the wealth.
There is NO upward trend. What the data shows is that wealth owned by the top 1% fluctuates around the 30-40% range, depending on factors like the business cycle. It’s been this way for at least 80 years. And if you look at figure 4 in that cite, you’ll see that the current concentration of wealth at the top is actually historically low, and has been on average lower over the past ten years than in any other ten year period since 1940. Class warriors, take note.
What’s really been happening is that the power and wealth of the middle class has increased, because technology and capital investment have made the middle class more productive. The real story is that there is a widening gap not between the rich and poor, but between the educated and the uneducated. All the income quintiles below the lowest generally have access to good educations, so they have been doing better and better. The poorest, least educated are staying where they are because they exist on government benefits and are generally lacking in education.
