Prometheus 6

Education has widened income inequality, too. Americans with college degrees earn nearly twice as much as those without them.

But education hasn't been a ticket to income growth lately. 

Between 2000 and 2005, workers with four-year college degrees saw their wages fall 3.1 percent, adjusted for inflation. Only two groups, who together make up just 3.4 percent of the workforce, saw inflation-adjusted wages rise. They were workers with doctoral degrees or specialty degrees, such as medicine or law, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. [P6: emphasis added]

The rich are getting much richer, much faster than everyone else
By Kevin G. Hall
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Over the past quarter-century, and especially in the last 10 years, America's very rich have grown much richer. No one else fared as well. 

In 2004, the richest 1 percent of households - 719,910 of them, with an average annual income of $326,720 - had 19.8 percent of the entire nation's pretax income. That's up from 17.8 percent a year earlier, according to a study by University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez.

The study, titled "The Evolution of Top Incomes," also found that the richest one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans - 129,584 households in 2004 - reported income equal to 9.5 percent of national pretax income.