Matt Sorley writes:

Arloc Sherman of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities writes today that “new data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) show that in 2006, the top 1 percent of households had a larger share of the nation’s after-tax income, and the middle and bottom fifths of households had smaller shares, than in any year since 1979, the first year the CBO data cover.” According to Sherman, this means that “the gaps in after-tax incomes between households in the top 1 percent and those in the middle and bottom fifths were the widest on record“:

Top incomes continued climbing in the 1990s, to 20.6 times higher than the middle fifth of households in 2000 and 21.3 times higher in 2005. By 2006, top incomes were 23.0 times higher than those of the middle fifth — nearly tripling the income gap between the top 1 percent and those in the middle since 1979.

The gap between the top 1 percent and the poorest fifth of Americans widened even more dramatically over this same period. In 1979, the incomes of the top 1 percent were 22.6 times higher than those of the bottom fifth. Top incomes continued climbing to 63.1 times higher in 2000 and 72.7 times higher by 2006 — more than tripling the rich-poor gap in 27 years.

Sherman adds that “taken together with prior research, the new data suggest greater income concentration at the top than at any time since 1929.”

SONNET XXIII

Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
Whom Jove’s great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from Death by force though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint
Purification in the Old Law did save,
And such, as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.
Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But O, as to embrace me she inclined
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.

There are a couple useful tidbits in EJ Dionne's column on Nancy Pelosi. First, he asks Pelosi why health reform is being considered for the reconciliation process but cap and trade is not. "The priority, of course, is to pass health care," Pelosi replies. To my knowledge, Pelosi hasn't said that before. More to the point, she's not signaled it. At a recent Maria Leavey breakfast, she implied just the opposite, and many folks I've spoken to on the Hill have suggested that her priority was energy rather than health care. Whatever those personal commitments and preferences, now everyone is signing from the same hymnal: Health care is the priority.

Dionne also offers a nice reminder of the changing composition of the House GOP, and the implications for bipartisanship.

>[Pelosi] also faces a Republican Party that is much more conservative and Southern than it used to be. It's easy to forget how dramatic the shift has been over time -- and therefore easy to miss how much of the current nostalgia for bipartisanship is unrealistic.

>In the Congress elected in 1960, there were 174 Republicans. Only seven came from the 11 states of the Old Confederacy, while 35 came from New York or New England, the heartlands of moderate Republicanism.

>In the current Congress, 72 of the 178 Republicans come from the Old Confederacy. Almost all of them are deeply conservative. There is not a single Republican House member from New England, and there are only three from New York.

In other words, there used to be a lot of people who believed similar things and came from similar perspectives but were in different parties. A New York Republican was probably closer to a New York Democrat than to a Mississippi Republican. That environment was ripe for bipartisanship. But now there are fewer people who believe similar things yet serve in different parties. There's more ideological coherence across the parties. But it's always worth pointing out that polarization is the norm, not the aberration. The post-War consensus was the aberration. This graph tracking the distance between the two congressional parties tells the story well:

This halcyon era of bipartisanship was a short blip that was primarily the product of a grotesque alliance between the anti-civil rights Dixiecrats and the conservative Republicans who would eventually absorb them. There's very little to fondly recall about that.