Bushenomics - and the winners are....

Wondering where the money went? Amygdala does a good job on pulling out the choice quotes from this Economist piece explaining the deceit behind the Bushenomic boom. Here's the money graf.

The figures are startling. According to Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Piketty of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the share of aggregate income going to the highest-earning 1% of Americans has doubled from 8% in 1980 to over 16% in 2004. That going to the top tenth of 1% has tripled from 2% in 1980 to 7% today. And that going to the top one-hundredth of 1%—the 14,000 taxpayers at the very top of the income ladder—has quadrupled from 0.65% in 1980 to 2.87% in 2004.

Ezra Klein also "gets" it and expands on the point.

Think about that. Are you really prepared to believe that the top one percent now gets paid 16 percent of the total income in this country because they developed "high social and customer-service skills"? And that the top hundredth of a percent quadrupled their take because they developed them so much faster than the rest of the country's CEOs? And that CEOs, who in the ‘70s made 30 times the salary of their average workers, now make 300 times the salary of their average worker because they became that much more social and customer-oriented?

This disparity is only occurring in the US. The CEOs European counterparts are not being compensated at even close to the same levels. As Amygdala points out, the true success of Bushenomics is that the GOP has managed to dupe the public into believing the reason the wealth isn't trickling down is because of illegal immigrants and exploited workers in other third world countries, when in truth most of the money is in the pockets of those 14,000 members of the US Corporatocracy.