Hillary Clinton was likely looking at this chart when she said we should 'topple' the top 1%
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, taking a populist tone, suggested that the US economy needs a "toppling" of the top 1%, according to a New York Times report published Tuesday.
Clinton's comments reportedly came during a meeting with economists in which she was shown a chart illustrating how incomes for the highest earners have skyrocketed in the US in recent years.
The World Top Incomes Database, developed by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez and their colleagues, assembles income tax data from several countries around the world to analyze the incomes of extremely rich people.
From that data, Business Insider made the following chart showing how the average real incomes of the top 1% and bottom 90% have changed in the United States over the last century. The bottom 90% saw income growth between the late 1930s and early 1970s, but their incomes have been stagnant ever since.
Meanwhile, Americans in the top 1% have always made way more than the masses in the bottom 90%. Incomes grew modestly for the top 1% during most of the twentieth century, and then exploded since the mid-1980s:
