The One Percent

Christopher Ketcham gives the data on the top 1% of household incomes in New York City (via Ritholtz):

New York, the FPI informs us, is now at the forefront of the maldistribution of wealth into the hands of the few that has been ongoing in America since 1980, which marked the beginning of a new Gilded Age. Out of the twenty-five largest cities, it is the most unequal city in the United States for income distribution. If it were a nation, it would come in as the fifteenth worst among 134 countries ranked by extremes of wealth and poverty—a banana republic without the death squads. It is the showcase for the top 1 percent of households, which in New York have an average annual income of $3.7 million. These top wealth recipients—let’s call them the One Percenters—took for themselves close to 44 percent of all income in New York during 2007 (the last year for which data is available). That’s a high bar for wealth concentration; it’s almost twice the record-high levels among the top 1 percent nationwide, who claimed 23.5 percent of all national income in 2007, a number not seen since the eve of the Great Depression. During the vaunted 2002–07 economic expansion—the housing-boom bubble that ended in our current calamity, this Great Recession—average income for the One Percenters in New York went up 119 percent.

Where is Mark Twain when you need him?  He could easily author an updated edition of The Gilded Age.  I really don't understand why people in Kansas (for instance) will vote for tax cuts for the uberwealthy in New York City, when Shawnee County, Kansas, the county containing the state capital of Topeka, doesn't have enough money to prosecute misdemeanors, including misdemeanor domestic violence.  Don't get me wrong, I think there are definitely too many prosecutions, but it is pretty bad when the only reason they aren't prosecuting crimes is because they don't have the money to staff the office.  Something is definitely wrong.