Richy Rich: Income Inequality Infographics

Over the past year we have heard the media frequently use the term "99%."  It's a figure that Occupy Wall Street has been quick to employ to find common ground with the masses.  It's also a phrase that pundits have used to comment on the platforms of this year's presidential candidates.  But The Atlantic features a new way of looking at the 99% / 1% divide, by depicting incomes along a stacked bar chart that resembles the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

The interesting chart comes from Scott Winship and is published on the Brookings Institution's website in an article about inequality within the top 1%.  The differences are striking.  If we take the poorest person in the top 1% of US incomes and put him on the 160th floor, then we would find the poorest person in the top 10% living on the 35th floor. Or, to put it another way, the disparity in earnings for these two individuals can be represented as a difference in 125 stories.  On the other hand, consider the median household income.  The poorest person in the top 50% of earners is separated from the poorest person in the top 10% by a mere 22 floors. The top one hundredth of incomes is separated from the poorest of the top 1% by 150 floors.  By contrast, the difference between the poorest individuals in the top 1% and those in the 2% is 67 floors

Numbers in Poverty Up; Minorities Hardest Hit As Wealth Disparity Widens

According to a recent report from the Census Bureau, 2.6 million more Americans fell into poverty in 2010; the 46.2 million people in poverty signaled both "the fourth consecutive annual increase and the largest number in the 52 years for which poverty estimates have been published." The report also contained disturbing news regarding the middle class: the New York Times writes that "median household incomes fell last year to levels last seen in 1997."

Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard, dubbed the period "a lost decade." He told the Times that this "was the first time since the Great Depression that median household income, adjusted for inflation, had not risen over such a long period," and he went so far as to say that "the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s." Adjusted for inflation, the median household income dropped to $49,445, a decline of 2.3 percent and seven percent below the high of $53,252 in 1999.

15.1 percent of Americans were below the poverty line ($22,314 for a family of four) last year, the highest percentage since 1993. And as the Times points out, the gap between the wealthy and poor continued to grow: "Median household income for the bottom tenth of the income spectrum fell by 12 percent from a peak in 1999, while the top 90th percentile dropped by just 1.5 percent."

The rising poverty rate was most severe for blacks and Hispanics. 27 percent of blacks were in poverty in 2010, up from 25 percent in 2009, and 26 percent of Hispanics--up from 25 percent in 2009--were also below the line. 9.9 percent of whites were in poverty in 2010, as compared with 9.4 percent in 2009. Among Asians, however, the poverty rate remained steady at 12.1 percent.

According to the Times, most economists agree that "joblessness was the main culprit pushing more Americans into poverty." And with President Obama recently proposed jobs bill, analysts say the Census report could swing support either way. As the Times reports, "the bleak numbers could help [Obama] make his case for urgency...[b]ut they could also be used against him by Republican opponents seeking to highlight economic shortcomings on his watch."

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