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Percentage gains in after-tax income from 2003 to 2005:

Bottom quintile: 2%
Next quintile: 2.4%
Middle quintile: 3.9%
Fourth quintile: 3.7%
Top quintile: 16%

Top 10%: 20.9%
Top 5%: 27.7%
Top 1%: 43.5%

According to Krugman’s analysis of the CBO’s Historical Effective Federal Tax Rates report released recently.

It was a boom, all right — but only for a few people.

Yup.

I mentioned income gaps a couple weeks ago... and Krugman has an astonishing quote in a recent interview with Mario Cuomo.

bq.. Cuomo: I was interested especially in education, where I think it’s very possible for people to say, look, one out of four of our workers are high-skilled, which is roughly four years after high school, and that’s one of the big problems. This is a high-skill society, etc, etc, and you don’t eliminate that as – of course, but then you diminished it a bit and are maybe saying too much about skill level and education.
Krugman: Yeah, by all means. But the huge increase in income gaps has occurred actually within people with a college education or equivalent. The high school teachers and hedge fund managers tend to have roughly similar levels of education actually, but the highest paid hedge fund manager in America was paid enough last year to pay the salaries of all 80,000 New York school teachers for five years. [Laughs] So that’s telling you something about where we really are.

Exactly. It says a lot about inequality and where the priorities are in Washington and the economy.