According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) between 1979 and 2007 income for the top 1 percent of households grew by 275 percent. The next 19 percent of households saw their income grow by 65 percent. Income grew 40 percent for the next 60 percent of households. The bottom 20 percent of households saw income growth of 18 percent. The figures were released in CBO's recent report  "Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007."


Further, CBO found that the share of income going to higher-income households rose, while the share going to lower-income households fell. The top one-fifth of the population saw a 10-percentage-point increase in their share of after-tax income, and most of that growth went to the top 1 percent of the population. Meanwhile, all other groups saw their shares of total income decline by 2 to 3 percentage points.