The Fortunate 400 and Challenging the Second Gilded Age

The Fortunate 400 and the Second Gilded Age

A century ago, we were living in period of extreme inequality. They called it the Gilded Age as gold-leaf trimmed mansions rose over Newport, Rhode Island.

Newport’s premier annual social event of the period was a gala party thrown by patrician Caroline Astor known as “the 400” for its exclusive guest list. Wealthy families clamored to be invited to the Astor estate –and falling off the invitation list was tantamount to exile.

We are now deeply into our Second Gilded Age with our own exclusive 400 lists. There is the annual fall release of the Forbes 400, a ranking of individual wealth. The list is now exclusively billionaires with a combined net worth of $1.54 trillion.

Now we have the “Fortunate 400,” a U.S. Treasury department analysis of the country’s top 400 income earners. This report –which doesn’t name names –reveals that these 400 households together earned $85.6 billion in 2005, an average income of $213.9 million each. See www.inequality.org.

For perspective, in 1982 when Forbes first published its 400 list, it only took $91 million in wealth, not income, to be included. The Fortunate 400 took home a stunning 1.15 percent of all the income earned in the U.S. in 2005.

All this has inspired the formation of the Working Group on Extreme Inequality, a network of labor, business, religious and civic organizations that is focusing attention at the corrosive effects of such levels of concentrated wealth and power.

Our program includes proposals to institute a progressive estate tax reform, level the playing field in terms of income taxation, and remove incentives for excessive compensation of corporate CEOS.

For starters, we could tax income from wealth at the same rate as work. The average federal income tax rate for the Fortunate 400 was 18.23 percent, low because 86 percent of their income was capital gains and taxed at a 15 percent rate. If their earners had been from wages, they would have paid income taxes closer to the top rate of 35 percent.

Come to our session at Take Back America to learn more
http://tba2008.confabb.com/conferences/tba2008/sessions/12385/details

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future