>Wonderful: the author said "take" so he must be a Marxist and can be ignored! As can the dictionary which foolishly asserts that "take" means "to get into one's hands or into one's possession, power, or control" which is nothing like the true meaning you have revealed. ;-)

>>>I could point to AN ANALYSIS OF THE CBO’S LATEST STUDY ON HOUSEHOLD INCOME DISTRIBUTION. Oh lookee, a link :
>http://budget.house.gov/UploadedFiles/CBOInequality.pdf
>
>Thanks for the analysis by Paul Ryan. Here are some original source figures and conclusions: http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/124xx/doc12485/WebSummary.pdf ... FWIW, the CBO report talks about the top 1% but latest figures say that the top 0.1% of the nation's earners is making about 50% of all capital gains on the sale of shares or property after 1 year. And paying 15% tax on these amounts that make up the majority of their income.
>
>FWIW, that 0.1% figure is quite significant. It had been said that the US oligarchy and disparity was most comparable to places like Iran, whereas figures like 0.1% are more consistent with other places that have been in the news recently.

The author's words matter. That they remind us of Marx is not by accident and accurately pointing that out is not irrelevant.

This entire argument over 1% or 0.1% or .01% or .0000000001% is all the same. It's class warfare designed to get people angry over a perceived overclass which has their boot on the neck of the poor. While that's an accurate description throughout history in places like pre-revolution France and presently in the middle east, it is not reflactive of the US for the simple reason that the US economy is dynamic in ways that those others aren't.

It's that very dynamism which allows significant upward mobility for individuals and famlies through the years.

From the report I linked:
The CBO took static snapshots of the income distribution at two different points in time, in this case 1979 and 2007. In examining these snapshots, it is clear that real income has grown significantly more for those at the upper end of the distribution than for those at the lower end over the past 30 years.

Yet the CBO concedes that the dynamism of the American economy is not properly captured by this analytical approach. It is not the case that individual households remained fixed in the income distribution over this period. The CBO readily points this out: The study “does not reflect the experience of particular households. Individual households may have moved up or down the income scale if their income rose or fell more than the average for their initial group.”

This is an important distinction, as considerable empirical evidence has made clear that there is a significant amount of movement across income quintiles over time – in other words, there is a lot of income mobility in the U.S. economy. A person working his or her way through college in a relatively low-paying job in year one, for instance, may have climbed into a much higher earnings level by year five. Comparing the low-income point in year one with that same low-income point in year five does not speak to this particular individual’s experience, because the individual has moved up over that time. As the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis puts it, since “incomes are not constant over time, the same households do not necessarily remain in the same income quintiles. Thus, comparing income quintiles from different years is a proverbial apples-to-oranges comparison because the households compared are at different stages in their earnings profile.”2

It's that same dynamism which is why the Occupy Whatever will come to nothing. It's not based in reality but rather a perception of unfairness, combined with a healthy dose of envy and a dash of self loathing at their own lack of success. Radical and criminal elements are naturally drawn into the crowd virtually guaranteeing that the mainstream will ignore them.

That, and the fact that the mainstream have to go to work. ;)