A government study finds that the richest 1 percent of Americans have been getting far richer over the last three decades.
At the same time, the middle class and poor have seen their after-tax household income only crawl up in comparison.
The study comes from the Congressional Budget Office and is based on IRS and Census Bureau data.
It finds that after-tax income for the top 1 percent of U.S. households almost tripled, up 275 percent, from 1979 to 2007. For people in the middle of the economic scale, after-tax income grew by just 40 percent.
Those in the bottom 20 percent, the poor, experienced an 18 percent increase.
The Occupy Wall Street movement protests the gap between the haves and have-nots. Demonstrators call themselves "the 99 percent."
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