title:  Thanks Obama! The 99 Percent Are Doing Better Than In 17 Years
text: The very cornerstone of Bernie Sanders  campaign is income inequality, and there s a very good reason for that. The statistics are mind-blowing. After all, those in the top one percent make 184 times those in the bottom 90 percent. Yes, it s that bad, but for the first time in 17 years, the bottom 90 percent have seen some gains. Unfortunately, the top 1 percent have seen more gains.The top 1 percent income earners in the United States hit a new high last year, according to the latest data from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. The bottom 99 percent of income earners registered the best real income growth (after factoring in inflation) in 17 years, but the top one percent did even better. The latest IRS data show that incomes for the bottom 99 percent of families grew by 3.9 percent over 2014 levels, the best annual growth rate since 1998, but incomes for those families in the top 1 percent of earners grew even faster, by 7.7 percent, over the same period.Source: Equitable GrowthThat might sound like a mixed bag, and it certainly is, but it does mark the first time since the Clinton administration where those who are struggling have seen real growth. Since the beginning of the 2009 recession, those below the top 10 percent have been seeing anemic 1.1 percent growth.While this news is pretty good, it s not great. To this day, the non-wealthy have only recovered 60 percent of lost wealth from the Great Recession. Things have been much, much better for those at the top:Income inequality in the United States persists at extremely high levels, particularly at the very top of the income ladder. Figure 1 shows that the incomes (adjusted for inflation) of the top 1 percent of families grew from $990,000 in 2009 to $1,360,000 in 2015, a growth of 37 percent. In contrast, the incomes of the bottom 99 percent of families grew only by 7.6 percent from $45,300 in 2009 to $48,800 in 2015. As a result, the top 1 percent of families captured 52 percent of total real income growth per family from 2009 to 2015 while the bottom 99 percent of families got only 48 percent of total real income growth. This uneven recovery is unfortunately on par with a long-term widening of inequality since 1980, when the top 1 percent of families began to capture a disproportionate share of economic growth.With Sanders all but out of the race, our attentions have to turn to what Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump might do to correct the problem.Trump plans very little, other than tax breaks for people making less than $25,000 a year. That does little to solve income inequality, but it could take enough money from the IRS that Republicans could claim that we, as taxpayers, can no longer afford food stamps or health care supplements.Clinton s plan is to raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour, middle class green job creation, small business incentives, college assistance and tax assistance.Of course, don t look for any real improvements in income inequality until the Supreme Court rules that corporations are no longer people. Donald Trump is not going to give us that Supreme Court. Hillary Clinton vows that she will.Featured image via Alex Wong at Getty Images.