You're richer than half the world's population.

$61,000 net worth would put you in the world's top 10%.

These are some of the facts that emerge from a study conducted by the United Nations University's World Institute for Development Economics Research, based on year 2000 statistics.

Other interesting facts:

• 1% of the world's richest adults own 40% of total global wealth;
• 2% of the world's richest adults own 51% of total global wealth
• 5% of the world's richest adults own 71% of total global wealth
• 10% of the world's richest adults own 85% of total global wealth

"Income inequality has been rising for the past 20 to 25 years and we think that is true for inequality in the distribution of wealth," said James Davies, a professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, one of the report's authors.

Globe and Mail article

[ 27 February 2007: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

More than terrorism or extremism, the unequal distribution of the world's wealth is the biggest long-term threat to global security.

Inequality is growing within countries as well. This is a recent US study.
http://tinyurl.com/y6zst6

Too bad the news is always so depressing.

Here are a couple more reports I have quoted from:

Inequality of Wealth and Income Distribution 1997-2002

Poverty and World Wealth

Here's some similar stuff specifically about Canada:

Rags and Riches - Wealth Inequality in Canada

An article in the Globe and Mail cites a new StatsCan survey showing that “the poorest rung [20%] of society saw its net worth deteriorate 70 per cent between 1999 and 2005, while the richest [20% of] families saw their total wealth grow 43 per cent.”

Wealth is measured by total assets minus total debts. All figures are adjusted for inflation.

The bottom 20% of Canada's families in 1999 had a negative wealth overall, their debts exceeding their assets by $3.7 billion. But by 2005 their net debt position had deteriorated to $6.3-billion.

The top 20% of Canada's families in 1999 had a MEDIAN net wealth of $671,600 per family, in excess of debts. That median had jumped to $862,900 by 2005. Overall, the net worth of this elite group grew 43.1% in those six years, and by 2005 it represented 69.2% of the country's total wealth.

The middle 20 % enjoyed a more modest gain in wealth over the same six years. Their median net wealth grew from $120,500 per family to $148,400, a gain of 23%.

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Even though job creation has been strong for years, and the unemployment rate is at a 30-year low, the poorest families have not been able to build their wealth because of low wages, economists said.

Corporate profits have soared, but the share of the country's money going toward wages and salaries has been sliding steadily over the past 20 years, said Hugh Mackenzie, an economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, which is in the midst of a major research project on income equality.

More ominous for the country's future, both economists said, is that about 30 per cent of Canadian families have no private savings for retirement -- no company pension plans or retirement savings plans.

Among the very poor -- families with earnings under $30,000 a year -- a total of 64 per cent had no access to retirement savings.

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Originally posted by John K:
I agree. A very important study.

More than terrorism or extremism, the unequal distribution of the world's wealth is the biggest long-term threat to global security.

Inequality is growing within countries as well. This is a recent US study.
http://tinyurl.com/y6zst6

Table 3 and Figure 4 are particularly sobering.

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Originally posted by West Coast Greeny:

Nobody who talks alot about terrorism or extremism ever mentions that the global inequality of wealth is what largely what drives terrorism and extremism.

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The Miami-based thugs who have carried out terrorist attacks on Cuba are not so poor.

The contras were basically terrorists who attacked civilians, schools and hospitals in Nicraragua. And they were trained and armed by some mysterious incubator for terrorists with a wealth of resources at its disposal.

African mercenary armies are often very poor, especially the child soldiers who are forced into it. Western businesses often fund these mercenary armies and "security" forces to seize control of diamonds and other mineral deposits in Africa.

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The top 10 per cent of Canadian families were the only group to increase their share of national net worth – homes, savings, family cottages, stocks and bonds and other assets – between 1984 and 2005.

They held 58.2 per cent of total Canadian wealth (not counting pension plan contributions) in 2005, compared to 51.8 per cent in 1984. The bottom 50 per cent of Canadian families saw their share of national wealth fall from 5.3 per cent in 1984 to 3.2 per cent in 2005.

If pension savings are included, the top 20 per cent of families raised their share of the national wealth from 68.5 per cent in 1999 to 69.2 per cent in 2005, and those in the next 20 per cent increased their share by a whisker, from 20.1 per cent to 20.2 per cent.

The bottom 60 per cent of families saw their share of national income decline, from 11.5 per cent to 10.8 per cent.

One place where the gap in future well-being shows up is in the level of pension contributions being made by families in different income groups.

According to a Statistics Canada study released in September, high-income families are making much greater contributions to their employer-sponsored pension plans and to their RRSPs than low-income families.

The contributions by families in the top 20 per cent rose significantly between 1986 and 2003, while those for the bottom 20 per cent showed no increase.

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There is a “mystery” we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. What do we make of this?

Over the last half century, U.S. industries and banks (and other western corporations) have invested heavily in those poorer regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America known as the “Third World.” The transnationals are attracted by the rich natural resources, the high return that comes from low-paid labor, and the nearly complete absence of taxes, environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety costs.

The U.S. government has subsidized this flight of capital by granting corporations tax concessions on their overseas investments, and even paying some of their relocation expenses---much to the outrage of labor unions here at home who see their jobs evaporating.

The transnationals push out local businesses in the Third World and preempt their markets. American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below cost and undersell local farmers. As Christopher Cook describes it in his Diet for a Dead Planet, they expropriate the best land in these countries for cash-crop exports, usually monoculture crops requiring large amounts of pesticides, leaving less and less acreage for the hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed the local populations.

By displacing local populations from their lands and robbing them of their self-sufficiency, corporations create overcrowded labor markets of desperate people who are forced into shanty towns to toil for poverty wages (when they can get work), often in violation of the countries’ own minimum wage laws.
....

The savings that big business reaps from cheap labor abroad are not passed on in lower prices to their customers elsewhere. Corporations do not outsource to far-off regions so that U.S. consumers can save money. They outsource in order to increase their margin of profit. In 1990, shoes made by Indonesian children working twelve-hour days for 13 cents an hour, cost only $2.60 but still sold for $100 or more in the United States.

U.S. foreign aid usually works hand in hand with transnational investment. It subsidizes construction of the infrastructure needed by corporations in the Third World: ports, highways, and refineries.

The aid given to Third World governments comes with strings attached. It often must be spent on U.S. products, and the recipient nation is required to give investment preferences to U.S. companies, shifting consumption away from home produced commodities and foods in favor of imported ones, creating more dependency, hunger, and debt.
....

The World Bank and IMF are supposed to assist nations in their development. What actually happens is another story. A poor country borrows from the World Bank to build up some aspect of its economy. Should it be unable to pay back the heavy interest because of declining export sales or some other reason, it must borrow again, this time from the IMF.

But the IMF imposes a “structural adjustment program” (SAP), requiring debtor countries to grant tax breaks to the transnational corporations, reduce wages, and make no attempt to protect local enterprises from foreign imports and foreign takeovers. The debtor nations are pressured to privatize their economies, selling at scandalously low prices their state-owned mines, railroads, and utilities to private corporations.

They are forced to open their forests to clear-cutting and their lands to strip mining, without regard to the ecological damage done. The debtor nations also must cut back on subsidies for health, education, transportation and food, spending less on their people in order to have more money to meet debt payments. Required to grow cash crops for export earnings, they become even less able to feed their own populations.

So it is that throughout the Third World, real wages have declined, and national debts have soared to the point where debt payments absorb almost all of the poorer countries’ export earnings - which creates further impoverishment as it leaves the debtor country even less able to provide the things its population needs.

Here then we have explained a “mystery.” It is, of course, no mystery at all if you don’t adhere to trickle-down mystification. Why has poverty deepened while foreign aid and loans and investments have grown? Answer: Loans, investments, and most forms of aid are designed not to fight poverty but to augment the wealth of transnational investors at the expense of local populations.

There is no trickle down, only a siphoning up from the toiling many to the moneyed few.
....

The real mystery is: why do some people find such an analysis to be so improbable, a “conspiratorial” imagining? Why are they skeptical that U.S. rulers knowingly and deliberately pursue such ruthless policies (suppress wages, rollback environmental protections, eliminate the public sector, cut human services) in the Third World? These rulers are pursuing much the same policies right here in our own country!

Isn’t it time that liberal critics stop thinking that the people who own so much of the world - and want to own it all - are “incompetent” or “misguided” or “failing to see the unintended consequences of their policies”? You are not being very smart when you think your enemies are not as smart as you. They know where their interests lie, and so should we.

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The real mystery is: why do some people find such an analysis to be so improbable, a “conspiratorial” imagining? Why are they skeptical that U.S. rulers knowingly and deliberately pursue such ruthless policies (suppress wages, rollback environmental protections, eliminate the public sector, cut human services) in the Third World? These rulers are pursuing much the same policies right here in our own country!

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Originally posted by Merowe:
excellent thread

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Originally posted by Southlander:
As it takes money to make money there's not much we can do, except batton down the hatches when the shit hits the fan, as it will when the swing goes too far. (wow, metaphors galore!

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The income gap is growing faster in the United States than in any other developed nation. Between 1990 and 2000 in the U.S. worker pay and inflation remained approximately equal, while corporate profits rose 93% and CEO pay rose 571%. Meanwhile, the portion of federal revenue derived from corporate income tax has decreased from 33% in the 1950s to 11.9% in 2005, reaching a low of 7.4% in 2003. Hundreds of companies have avoided taxes by relocating to tax havens such as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. Eighty-two of our largest corporations paid no tax in at least one of the first three years of the Bush administration.

Around the world, the income gap has increased between and within countries. Workers' share of national income in developed countries is at its lowest level in 30 years. Our agricultural subsidies enrich a few people while making it impossible for farmers in the developing world to sell their crops in their own countries. According to the United Nations Report on the World Social Situation 2005, the OECD countries that have most vigorously implemented economic policies have experienced the greatest increases in inequality within their countries. The money doesn't reach the people most in need. The New Economics Foundation reports that only 60 cents out of every $100.00 of world income goes to those in extreme poverty, much less than in the 1980s before the growth of structural adjustment policies. Globalized markets seem to reward those with the education, financial wherewithal, and business skills to make them work.

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Rising inequality isn't new. The gap between rich and poor started growing before Ronald Reagan took office, and it continued to widen through the Clinton years. But what is happening under Bush is something entirely unprecedented: For the *first time in our history, so much growth is being siphoned off to a small, wealthy minority that most Americans are failing to gain ground even during a time of economic growth -- and they know it.

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As it takes money to make money there's not much we can do, except batton down the hatches when the shit hits the fan, as it will when the swing goes too far. (wow, metaphors galore!)
We can't legislate to stop this, as if people can't work to get rich, they won't work (the comunists tried this). So can we remove the 'it takes money to make money' without changing the 'work harder to make more' bit? Sorry don't think so.

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This wrong in every respect. Not only are ordinary people getting poorer and poorer over the last twenty years, but they're working harder and harder as well. Capitalism is not a meritocracy. It is set up so that capital always accumulates more capital, but this is fundamentally unbalanced because it is work that actually creates wealth.

Money is supposed to stand for work in some abstract way, so that people can be compensated for their labour, but instead our current system gives it a vampiric life of its own, so that wealth continues to concentrate, and as it does it siphons more and more wealth away from the people who are actually creating it through the sweat of their brow. This is why Paris Hilton will just keep getting richer, without ever lifting a finger.

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Canadian families are putting in more work time, yet most - 80% of them - are getting a smaller share of Canada's growing economy, says a study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).

The study finds Canada's income gap between the rich and poor is growing, largely because the lion's share of Canada's economic growth is going to the richest 10% of families. It's not going to the majority, the 80% of families earning under a $100,000.

"Canada's gap is growing at a time when Canadian families are playing by all the rules - working harder, contributing to a growing economy - but most aren't getting payback," says study author Armine Yalnizyan, research fellow with the CCPA.

The study, The Rich and the Rest of Us: The Changing Face of Canada's Growing Gap, looks at the earnings and after-tax incomes of Canadian families raising children under 18, comparing families in the late 1970s and those in the early 2000s. The study finds:

• Canada's income gap is growing: In 2004, the richest 10% of families earned 82 times more than the poorest 10% - almost triple the ratio of 1976, when they earned 31 times more. In after-tax terms the gap is at a 30-year high.
  
• Bottom half shut out: Between 1976-79 the bottom half earned 27% of total earnings. Between 2001-04 that dropped to 20.5%, though they worked more. Up to 80% of families lost ground or stayed put compared to the previous generation, in both earnings and after-tax terms. The poorest saw real incomes drop.
  
• Work is not enough: All but the richest 10% of families are working more weeks and hours in the paid workforce (200 hours more on average since 1996) yet only the richest 10% saw a significant increase in their earnings - 30%.

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The report paints a stark portrait of the vast majority of families, including the middle class, working longer hours but losing ground.

Take Myrna Stoller. The 50-year-old hotel-room cleaner and her husband, a tool and die designer, earn a combined $70,000 annually – the average income for a Canadian family in 2004. They don't feel average though, or middle class.

"It's getting worse because everything is so expensive, yet our wages increase just a little. Before you know it, you're getting behind," said Stoller, who arrived here 20 years ago from the Philippines and has raised three children, two still in their teens.

For 16 years she has picked up after the privileged at the Royal York Hotel, working 40-hour weeks tidying up rooms that go for $280 to $450 a night. She often sees the same people. "I see the rich are getting richer," she said. "But we're not getting to where we're supposed to be."

History has shown the income gap typically grows during recessions as low-wage workers are laid off. The gap tends to shrink during periods of economic prosperity.

Not so today.

"A rising economic tide raises all boats, but what we are seeing is that some of those boats are yachts that are sailing far out into the harbour and are turning into rocket ships," said the study's author, Armine Yalnizyan, research director for the Toronto Community Social Planning Council.

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See also: Thomas Walkom

[ 01 March 2007: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

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Originally posted by Fidel:

The Miami-based thugs who have carried out terrorist attacks on Cuba are not so poor.

The contras were basically terrorists who attacked civilians, schools and hospitals in Nicraragua. And they were trained and armed by some mysterious incubator for terrorists with a wealth of resources at its disposal.

African mercenary armies are often very poor, especially the child soldiers who are forced into it. Western businesses often fund these mercenary armies and "security" forces to seize control of diamonds and other mineral deposits in Africa.

I think it's true that al Qaeda and Taliban recruits are poor though and anywhere from illiterate to semi-literate. But the nations who funded the Talibanization of Pakistan and Afghanistan are some of the richest countries in the world. OBL himself came from a very wealthy family.

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Desperate Guatemalans didn't support Juan Efrain Rios Montt or his U.S.-backed dictatorship

Desperate Nicaraguans didn't support the contras.

Desperate Vietnamese peasants didn't support the U.S. army. or corrupt Diem family.

Desperate Salvadorans didn't support U.S.-funded and armed death squads.

About 80 percent of Haiti's desperate didn't overthrow their democratically elected leader in this decade.

[ 01 March 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by oreobw:
$70,000 per year sounds like a quite a good income to me. I would like to see the family budget to see where the money is going.

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Despite Canada's GDP almost doubling in real terms (after accounting for inflation) over the last quarter century, almost all of the real gains in earned incomes have been in the top 10% of income earners.

The study does acknowledge that once government transfers are factored in (especially the child tax benefit) the situation improves somewhat. BUT it's a scandal that almost all of the gains in the job market in the past 25 years have flowed to the top 10%. To make matters worse, they are the only ones who are actually working fewer hours. Everybody else is working more hours.

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
What's your point? You think they're rich?

That's income from two jobs - one of them highly skilled. These people are supposed to be in their peak earning years, and saving for retirement. No doubt they spend a great deal of their money on their two teenaged children.

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Of course I don't think they are rich. Why would I?

Still, $70,000 still sounds like a good income to me, and it would be nice to know where the $70,000 is going.

So why do you have a problem with my comment?

[ 01 March 2007: Message edited by: oreobw ]

You only want to know so you can pass some kind of judgment on them.

Go find another thread to derail.

[ 01 March 2007: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
What possible business is it of yours where their money is going?

You only want to know so you can pass some kind of judgment on them.

Go find another thread to derail.

[ 01 March 2007: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

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I was not trying to either derail or pass judgement but you can think so if you like.

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Originally posted by oreobw:
I was not trying to either derail or pass judgement but you can think so if you like.

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Jim Stanford published a chart for incomes across Canada for 1999 based on filed taxes. It showed that 52 percent of all adult Canadians earned anywhere below $20K. And it showed that most(68th percentile) Canadians were not earning $30 thousand gross each year at that point in time.

Average incomes have gone up since then, surely. The 90's and 14 years post-NAFTA were a disaster. I wonder what it is today.

[ 01 March 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Sure, in a perfect world, they would get a bit more, but given the extreme imbalance between nations - I can tell you that I would much prefer to see goverment money going to foreign aid than to Canadians who are marginalized because they can't go on a vacation, or can't send their kids to hockey camp, or give them the latest clothes.

Secondly, as much as people are going to disagree - I think globalization is one of the answers to fixing the inequality - but it has to be managed properly - so that globalization does not mean MNC's sucking all the resources out of the land for nothing, and paying nothing for labour. It needs to be effectively managed.

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Firstly, in the context of global inequality, I have to agree with Oreo - 70,000 is a decent amount of money. They are certainly not the people I would pick out as poster people for inequality.

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Second, her husband does seem to have a decent paying job (good for him) but she does not. As a worker in one of Canada's ritziest hotels, she also deserves a fair wage for a hard day's work.

And the old saw Palamedes dredges up about being thankful for what we have because the poor people in the Third World are so much worse off. Talk about missing the point.

It's time unions and others who fight for fair wages and benefits stopped being put on the defensive for doing so. Unions are equality fighters. In doing so, they perform a valuable service to the long-term well-being of Canadian society.

Thomas Walkom says it best:

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Perhaps the most important aspect of this report is that it moves the debate beyond simple questions of poverty. It is easy to decry poverty. We all think, in theory at least, that it would nicer if so many people weren't poor. But as Yalnizyan writes, poverty – the fact that some have so little in the midst of so much – cannot be understood in isolation. "We cannot (focus) solely on poverty as though it has no context," she says.

That context is the way we organize our economy. We have put in place a system where it is difficult for those, except the best-paid workers, to reap the full rewards of their labour. We allow the country's 100 top chief executive officers to make, on average, 240 times more than the typical worker (up from 106 times the average wage in 1998). In fact, we lionize these CEOs. We make it difficult to unionize the new, fast-growing sectors of the economy where the poor and middling classes work.

We elect tax-cutting governments, thinking, mistakenly, that these cuts will benefit us (on average, they don't). And we pooh-pooh as unfashionable anyone who argues that, just maybe, the world of work should be fairer.

Writes Yalnizyan: "The rich are getting richer; the poor aren't going anywhere, and there are fewer people in the middle to mediate the two extremes. We ignore those trends at our collective peril." She is correct.

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Enough with the high horse already, do you think she is reading Babble? Am I ridiculing her, or am I saying I think 70,000 is not that bad? It's hardly degrading to her, so stop trying to use this blitheringly transparent and dishonest approach.

No, 70,000 is not that much. It would be nice if they got more. But, it's enough. I'm sorry but I have spent too much time in third world countries that have real poverty to have sympathy for a family of four that makes 70,000.

I have lived on 10,000 a year at times. Did I have a wonderful life? No. Would I have preferred to be in Bangladesh, or Guatemala? No.

Was I able to survive adequately, and even have modest entertainment? Yes.

So, sorry if I'm not sheddding any tears because these poor people are degraded by making their kids share a room - or because they can't get all the cable channels , or because they have to buy a second hand car. How awful.

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It took incredible courage for me to make that post. I don't deserve to be ridiculed for it.

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It takes no courage for someone hiding behind a psuedonym to post on babble.

It takes considerably more courage for someone in a low paying job using their real name to speak out in a daily newspaper read by millions of people.

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Originally posted by Palamedes:
No, 70,000 is not that much. It would be nice if they got more. But, it's enough.

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It would be even better if Palamedes and oreobw recognized that the point of the article, and of the CCPA report that was its subject, was not that families earning $70,000 a year are poor, but that they are working harder than ever before and have nothing more to show for it.

For the benefit of the reading-impaired I tried to make it simple by bold-facing the words working longer hours but losing ground. Maybe I should have used colour as well.

Again, the report says that all but the richest 10% of families are working more weeks and hours in the paid workforce (200 hours more on average since 1996) yet only the richest 10% saw a significant increase in their earnings - 30%. Meanwhile, those richest 10% are working less.

Personal savings rates are at all-time lows.

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Among the newest, youngest and fastest-growing group of billionaires, the Russian oligarchy stands out for its most rapacious beginnings. Over two-thirds (67%) of the current Russian billionaire oligarchs began their concentration of wealth in their mid to early twenties. During the infamous decade of the 1990’s under the quasi-dictatorial rule of Boris Yeltsin and his US-directed economic advisers, Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar the entire Russian economy was put up for sale for a ‘political price’, which was far below its real value. Without exception, the transfers of property were achieved through gangster tactics – assassinations, massive theft, and seizure of state resources, illicit stock manipulation and buyouts. The future billionaires stripped the Russian state of over a trillion dollars worth of factories, transport, oil, gas, iron, coal and other formerly state-owned resources.
....

Forbes Magazine puts out a yearly list of the richest individuals and families in the world. What is most amusing about the famous Forbes Magazine’s background biographical notes on the Russian oligarchs is the constant reference to their source of wealth as ‘self-made’ as if stealing state property created by and defended for over 70 years by the sweat and blood of the Russian people was the result of the entrepreneurial skills of thugs in their twenties. Of the top eight Russian billionaire oligarchs, all got their start from strong-arming their rivals, setting up ‘paper banks’ and taking over aluminum, oil, gas, nickel and steel production and the export of bauxite, iron and other minerals. Every sector of the former Communist economy was pillaged by the new billionaires: Construction, telecommunications, chemicals, real estate, agriculture, vodka, foods, land, media, automobiles, airlines etc..
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If blood and guns were the instruments for the rise of the Russian billionaire oligarchs, in other regions the Market, or better still, the US-IMF-World Bank orchestrated Washington Consensus was the driving force behind the rise of the Latin American billionaires. The two countries with the greatest concentration of wealth and the greatest number of billionaires in Latin America are Mexico and Brazil (77%), which are the two countries, which privatized the most lucrative, efficient and largest public monopolies. Of the total $157.2 billion USD owned by the 38 Latin American billionaires, 30 are Brazilians or Mexicans with $120.3 billion USD. The wealth of 38 families and individuals exceeds that of 250 million Latin Americans; 0.000001% of the population exceeds that of the lowest 50%. In Mexico, the income of 0.000001% of the population exceeds the combined income of 40 million Mexicans. The rise of Latin American billionaires coincides with the real fall in minimum wages, public expenditures in social services, labor legislation and a rise in state repression, weakening labor and peasant organization and collective bargaining. The implementation of regressive taxes burdening the workers and peasants and tax exemptions and subsidies for the agro-mineral exporters contributed to the making of the billionaires. The result has been downward mobility for public employees and workers, the displacement of urban labor into the informal sector, the massive bankruptcy of small farmers, peasants and rural labor and the out-migration from the countryside to the urban slums and emigration abroad.

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Income inequality grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans - those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 - receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows. The top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000, also reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression.

While total reported income in the United States increased almost 9 percent in 2005, the most recent year for which such data is available, average incomes for those in the bottom 90 percent dipped slightly compared with the year before, dropping $172, or 0.6 percent.

The gains went largely to the top 1 percent, whose incomes rose to an average of more than $1.1 million each, an increase of more than $139,000, or about 14 percent.

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.

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The New York Times March 29, 2007

Income Gap Is Widening, Data Shows

By David Cay Johnston

Income inequality grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans — those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 — receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows.

The top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000, also reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression.

While total reported income in the United States increased almost 9 percent in 2005, the most recent year for which such data is available, average incomes for those in the bottom 90 percent dipped slightly compared with the year before, dropping $172, or 0.6 percent.

The gains went largely to the top 1 percent, whose incomes rose to an average of more than $1.1 million each, an increase of more than $139,000, or about 14 percent.

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.

Prof. Emmanuel Saez, the University of California, Berkeley, economist who analyzed the Internal Revenue Service data with Prof. Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, said such growing disparities were significant in terms of social and political stability.

"If the economy is growing but only a few are enjoying the benefits, it goes to our sense of fairness," Professor Saez said. "It can have important political consequences."

Last year, according to data from other sources, incomes for average Americans increased for the first time in several years. But because those at the top rely heavily on the stock market and business profits for their income, both of which were strong last year, it is likely that the disparities in 2005 are the same or larger now, Professor Saez said.

He noted that the analysis was based on preliminary data and that the highest-income Americans were more likely than others to file their returns late, so his data might understate the growth in inequality.

The disparities may be even greater for another reason. The Internal Revenue Service estimates that it is able to accurately tax 99 percent of wage income but that it captures only about 70 percent of business and investment income, most of which flows to upper-income individuals, because not everybody accurately reports such figures.

The Bush administration argued that its tax policies, despite cuts that benefited those at the top more than others, had not added to the widening gap but "made the tax code more progressive, not less." Brookly McLaughlin, the chief Treasury Department spokeswoman, said that this year "the share of income taxes paid by lower-income taxpayers will be lower than it would have been without the tax relief, while the share of income taxes for higher-income taxpayers will be higher."

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., she noted, has acknowledged that income disparities have increased, but, along with a "solid consensus" of experts, attributed that shift largely to "the rapid pace of technological change has been a major driver in the decades-long widening of the income gap in the United States."

Others argued that public policies had played a role in the shift. Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, an advocacy group for the poor, said that the data understates the widening disparity between the top 1 percent and the rest of the country.

He said that in addition to rising incomes and reduced taxes, the equation should take into account cuts in fringe benefits to workers and in government services that middle-class and poor Americans rely on more than the affluent. These include health care, child care and education spending.

"The nation faces some very tough choices in coming years," he said. "That such a large share of the income gains are going to the very top, at a minimum, raises serious questions about continuing to provide tax cuts averaging over $150,000 a year to people making more than a million dollars a year, while saying we do not have enough money" to provide health insurance to 47 million Americans and cutting education benefits.

A major issue likely to be debated in Congress in the year ahead is whether reversing the Bush tax cuts would slow investment and, if so, how much that would cost the economy.

Mr. Greenstein’s organization will release a report today showing that for Americans in the middle, the share of income taken by federal taxes has been essentially unchanged across four decades. By comparison, it has fallen by half for those at the very top of the income ladder.

Because the incomes of those at the top have grown so much more than those below them, their share of total income tax revenue has risen despite the reduced rates.

The analysis by the two professors showed that the top 10 percent of Americans collected 48.5 percent of all reported income in 2005.

That is an increase of more than 2 percentage points over the previous year and up from roughly 33 percent in the late 1970s. The peak for this group was 49.3 percent in 1928.

The top 1 percent received 21.8 percent of all reported income in 2005, up significantly from 19.8 percent the year before and more than double their share of income in 1980. The peak was in 1928, when the top 1 percent reported 23.9 percent of all income.

The top tenth of a percent and top one-hundredth of a percent recorded even bigger gains in 2005 over the previous year. Their incomes soared by about a fifth in one year, largely because of the rising stock market and increased business profits.