USA: A Banana Republic?

The New York Times reports this morning that the “income gap” in the United States continues to grow. According to a study of IRS data conducted by Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, the top 10% of Americans now enjoy a greater share of the nation’s wealth than at any time since the eve of the Great Depression: “The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980.”