David Cay Johnston of the New York Times crunches some IRS data and reaches one non-incendiary conclusion, and one incendiary conclusion.

The non-incendiary conclusion:

Americans earned a smaller average income in 2005 than in 2000, the fifth consecutive year that they had to make ends meet with less money than at the peak of the last economic expansion, new government data shows.

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While incomes have been on the rise since 2002, the average income in 2005 was $55,238, still nearly 1 percent less than the $55,714 in 2000, after adjusting for inflation, analysis of new tax statistics show.

Reason this conclusion is non-incendiary: 2000 was a peak, the last year of a bubble. As a chart accompanying the story shows, average income fell in both 2001 and 2002, and have since recovered decently.

The incendiary conclusion:

The growth in total incomes was concentrated among those making more than $1 million. The number of such taxpayers grew by more than 26 percent, to 303,817 in 2005, from 239,685 in 2000.

These individuals, who constitute less than a quarter of 1 percent of all taxpayers, reaped almost 47 percent of the total income gains in 2005, compared with 2000.

People with incomes of more than a million dollars also received 62 percent of the savings from the reduced tax rates on long-term capital gains and dividends that President Bush signed into law in 2003, according to a separate analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, a group that points out policies that it says favor the rich.

The group’s calculations showed that 28 percent of the investment tax cut savings went to just 11,433 of the 134 million taxpayers, those who made $10 million or more, saving them almost $1.9 million each. Over all, this small number of wealthy Americans saved $21.7 billion in taxes on their investment income as a result of the tax-cut law.

Reason this conclusion is incendiary: Even in this new Gilded Age, when evidence of income inequality is rampant, and, indeed, celebrated, the fact that 1/400th of the taxpayers took home nearly half of the economic gains between 2000 and 2005 is shocking. The data, combined with what we know about *median* income (i.e. the income of a typical American), gives the lie to the contention that the prosperity of recent years has been widely shared.

 Oh, and speaking of the rich getting richer, Harvard University's endowment gained 23 percent in the past year.