Over at growinggap.ca, Armine Yalnizyan reports that the latest StatsCan study of high-income Canadians shows the rich are getting richer, while 90% of Canadians are taking home a smaller portion of the income pie.
Those at the very top have seen their incomes double in the past two decades. The share of incomes going to the top 1% has soared — rising from 8.5% in 1982 to 12.2% in 2004 (a 43% increase in their piece of the pie). The higher up the income spectrum you go, the better the story gets.
And perhaps most shockingly 80% of Canadians have seen no improvement in their incomes since 1982.
In his article “Trickle-up economics: The rich are getting richer — and we’re all helping,” Hugh Mackenzie, a research associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, illustrates how the average Canadian is paying dearly for tax cut of the past decade. According to Statistics Canada:
between 1992 and 2004, Canada’s income tax system ceased to be progressive for the richest 5 percent of tax filers. And what about the rest of us? For almost a decade, our provincial and federal governments have been talking tax cuts, but those cuts went into the pockets of the richest of the rich. And that tax break only bolstered the unprecedented growth in the share of income going to Canada’s richest.
The top 0.01percent, the millionaires sitting at the top of the heap, enjoyed an average effective tax rate drop of 11 percentage points.
The income/wealth gaps are growing in the US too. See Jack Rasmus’ three part study of the “trillion dollar income shift” in Z Magazine [Part 1 (Feb. 2007), Part 2 (April 2007), Part 3 (May 2007)]
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