A blog post by Mark Price, originally published at Third and State.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette runs with a story this morning on the latest data from the Congressional Budget Office on income inequality in America (PDF).  

• Patricia Sabatini, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — The real '1 percent' may surprise you:

If you thought it took millions to land in the top 1 percent of earners targeted by demonstrators, you should know the actual threshold is $343,927, according to IRS statistics for the calendar year 2009, the latest available ...

After-tax income for the richest 1 percent of Americans almost tripled from 1979 to 2007, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office.

At the same time, people in the middle of the scale saw their incomes grow by just under 40 percent and those in the bottom 20 percent saw a gain of about 18 percent.

"The distribution of after-tax household income in the United States was substantially more unequal in 2007 than in 1979," the CBO said.

For some additional context, a household income of $349,850 or higher will land you in the top 1% of Pennsylvania tax filers, according to 2009 tax data from the state Department of Revenue. 

Fair warning, Sabatini only interviews a researcher from the Tax Foundation for her story and even provides a link to some Tax Foundation analysis. To quote Paul Krugman, "knowledgeable people don’t trust the Tax Foundation."

Jared Bernstein at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities provides a more concise and focused summary of the latest data.

• Jared Bernstein, Off The Charts — Inequality Growing, and Government Doing Less About It:

The share of the nation’s total income accruing to the middle 60 percent of households fell from around half in 1979 to a bit above 40 percent in 2007. Virtually all of this decline (and the decline in the share of income held by the bottom 20 percent of households) is reflected in the increase for the top 1 percent, whose share of the nation’s total income more than doubled.