the rich get richer

A non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) study on income inequality reaffirmed that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

“The poorest 20% of tax filers experienced a 6% reduction in income while the top 0.1% of tax filers saw their income almost double,” according the the CRS report.

82 percent of income received by about 80 percent of the people comes from work in the form of wages and salaries, people in the top tenth of one percent (0.1%) work for only 18.6 percent of their annual income.

The top tenth of the top one percent, average 2006 income was $5.7 million.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney, Presidential hopeful, displays his confusion about class when he explains that “Somebody who’s fallen from the middle class to poverty, in my opinion is still middle class.”

And in Canada the average "Elite 100" CEO has earned more than the average Canadian's annual income by noon on January 3. Top CEOs got 189 times the average worker's pay in 2010

While the 100 highest paid CEOs of companies listed in the S&P/TSX composite index earned an average of $8.38 million in 2010, the average full-time Canadian worker was paid just $44,366. Even more telling is that compensation for the top 100 CEOs was up 27 per cent from the year before, while the inflation-adjusted wages of the average Canadian actually fell in 2009.