<p>Barrons, thank you for the link. The chart (and the source material at EPI which accompanies it) spell out in clear detail exactly what I’ve been talking about. If you look, from 1962 to 1983, the annual growth in wealth of the top quintile was 1.8%. The average growth in wealth for the other 80% was 1.7% - a little less, but the rising tide was in fact lifting all boats. But look at what happened after that. Although the time periods are a little odd (83-89, 89-2001, 2001-'04) making direct comparisons a little tough, the growth in wealth of the top 20% has outstripped that of everyone else by a wide margin - not always as grossly as during the Reagan Administration, where the affluent and wealthy enjoyed 2.7% annual growth in wealth as a group (the top 1% rose 4% per year!)while the bottom 80% only posted nominal gains of 0.2% per year, but always a wide margin nonetheless. In a given year (or period of a few years) may see a little jockeying among the components of the various parts of the quintiles, but the overall trend is unmistakable. And the result is unsurprising: <a href=“http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/tabfig/05/SWA06_Fig5B.jpg[/url]”>http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/tabfig/05/SWA06_Fig5B.jpg</a></p>
![http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/tabfig/05/SWA06_Fig5B.jpg[/url]](http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/tabfig/05/SWA06_Fig5B.jpg%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
<p>Again, to me the issue is not so much where we are now, but where we’ll be in twenty or forty years. Do we continue down this path? Or do we regress to the mean? There are active forces at work pushing us farther down the path to increasing stratification of wealth. If we ignore them, we’ll continue down that path. I don’t like thinking about my kids having to deal with the consequences of that trend continuing.</p>