Income Inequality in Numbers

Via Calculated Risk, the Washington Post:

For years, statistics have depicted growing income disparity in the United States, and it has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. In 2008, the last year for which data are available, for example, the top 0.1 percent of earners took in more than 10 percent of the personal income in the United States, including capital gains, and the top 1 percent took in more than 20 percent. But economists had little idea who these people were. How many were Wall street financiers? Sports stars? Entrepreneurs? Economists could only speculate, and debates over what is fair stalled......
The top 0.1 percent of earners make about $1.7 million or more, including capital gains. Of those, 41 percent were executives, managers and supervisors at non-financial companies, according to the analysis, with nearly half of them deriving most of their income from their ownership in privately-held firms. An additional 18 percent were managers at financial firms or financial professionals at any sort of firm. In all, nearly 60 percent fell into one of those two categories.

The article discusses reasons why the outlook on income inequality has changed so dramatically since the 1970's.  I think part of this is that the society has accepted too readily the idea that the people who make this money have earned it, and that they work harder than anyone else.  There is a moral component to the issue, which people who grew up in the Depression understood, but that later generations don't.  Progressive income taxes helped to balance the scales, but since the Reagan administration, the trend has been to lower progressivity.  One would think that today's economic difficulties would cause people to give the issue more consideration, but so far, that doesn't seem to be the case.