US income inequality worst since 20's

Among the stats released by the IRS (and you know, girlfriend, that the rich have all kinds of ways of hiding their income, so things are undoubtedly much worse than these stats indicate):

-- The top 1% earned 21.2 percent of all income in 2005, up from 19 percent in 2004.

That is, the top 1% gets more than 1/5 of all income.

-- The bottom 50% earned 12.8 percent of all income in 2005, down from 13.4 percent.

That is, the bottom 50% gets about 1/8 of all income.

One of the interesting things about keeping track, to whatever small degree, of things like this is seeing the same old ludicrous and empirically disconfirmed excuses wheeled out over and over by Bush et al.   So last time stats on inequality came out, Bush was all about his "the income gap was an education gap"; now it's that "skills gaps yield income gaps".  Whatever.