In a recent New York Times column, Paul Krugman frets that we are in a "New Gilded Age" because "every available measure of income concentration shows that we've gone back to levels of inequality not seen since the 1920s."
The only estimates that go back to the 1920s are a 1953 study of income tax data by Simon Kuznets and an updated 2001 study along the same lines by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. The Kuznets estimates can't possibly be compared with recent data, so Krugman's "every available measure" turns out to be another veiled reference to Piketty and Saez. It echoes an earlier New York Times article by David Cay Johnston, which claimed that in 2005 the top 1 percent of Americans (with incomes above $348,000) received "their largest share of national income since 1928."
Unfortunately, the estimates for 2005 can't be compared with those from 1928, because Piketty and Saez used a much broader measure of total income for 1913-1943 than they did for later years. For 1928, the top 1 percent's income was divided by 80 percent of personal income. For 2005, the top 1 percent's income was divided by a figure only 62 percent as large as personal income. If total income is measured in the same way, then the top 1 percent's share was 13.3 percent in 2005 -- not remotely close to the 19.8 percent figure for 1928.
The Piketty-Saez income figures are before taxes, yet Krugman uses them to propose that we "raise taxes on the rich." He argues, "Taxation has become much less progressive: according to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, average tax rates on the richest 0.01 percent of Americans have been cut in half since 1970, while taxes on the middle class have risen."
That claim about middle class taxes is false. Piketty and Saez show average taxes for the bottom 90 percent falling from 20.4 percent in 1970 to 18.5 percent in 2000.
As for the richest 0.01 percent, that means 7,992 taxpayers in 1970 who reported incomes above $1 million (in 2005 dollars). Piketty and Saez would have you believe those 7,992 households paid an average of 74.6 percent of their income to the federal government alone in 1970. The comparable tax estimate for 2004 is 34.7 percent, which is apparently considered to be obviously less desirable than a 74.6 percent tax, though perhaps not as perfect as 99.9 percent.
Before anyone could possibly believe the nation's most successful people were ever so docile as to fork over three-fourths of their income to the federal government it is essential to understand that Piketty and Saez study "behavioral responses to taxation such as tax avoidance or reduction of labor supply or savings due to taxation." The rich are thus considered so unresponsive that we can safely assume they do not even shift into tax-exempt bonds (whose income went unreported before 1987).
The Piketty-Saez tax estimates are used as a rationale for raising (SET ITAL) individual (END ITAL) tax rates. However, my 2006 column on "The Top One-Hundredth of One Percent" used their figures to show that the top group's income tax rate rose from 25.8 percent in 1990 to 28.1 percent in 2005, while income taxes on the middle fifth dropped from 7.2 percent to 3.3 percent.
Piketty and Saez say the reduction of taxes at the top since 1970 was "mainly because of the impact of the corporate income tax and the estate tax." But that is because they "assume that the corporate income tax falls on capital income and that all financial assets (and not only corporate stock) bear the tax equally."
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