Brooking’s Gary Burtless reports, “Top income recipients have not yet recovered the income losses they suffered in the Great Recession. In 2015 their average market income was still 13 percent below its pre-recession level,” while the bottom 90%’s income has fallen 8%. Previously, partisans only reported that “between 2009 and 2015, income recipients in the top 1 percent enjoyed real income gains of 24 percent… [while] incomes climbed only 4 percent…among Americans in the bottom nine-tenths of the income distribution.” They failed to mention that “between 2007 and 2009 [the top 1%] saw their inflation-adjusted incomes drop 36 percent, [while the] …income of Americans in the bottom nine-tenths of the distribution fell…12 percent.” According to the Congressional Budget Office, lower federal taxes and increased government transfers largely offset the losses suffered by the bottom 90%.
