[jyl]

I'm not sure why you label the top, red line as being "Wall Street". Most people with incomes in the top 1% are not on Wall Street. Many are professional of other sorts. Many are business owners. The typical McDonald's franchise owner makes $500K to $1MM income per restaurant (according to MCD).

And I assume you can see the difference between the second, yellow line and the lower two lines. As I've told you, the yellow line doesn't represent "Wall Street" at all. The only people on Wall Street making $100K are the most junior ones.

So, let's go back to the point that the chart makes. Which is not this Wall Street vs Main Street thing you came up with. The point is that employers generally, who are mostly represented by the two upper lines, are achieving income gains much larger than the bulk of employees, who are mostly represented by the two lower lines.

Yes, I realize there are very small employers (very small businesses) whose income is in the lower two lines. My father in law was one. He had a small janitor service. If he'd had to increase his (three) employees' wages by 50%, he would have had to do with fewer employees, work longer hours himself, and make less money. Because the local Safeway wouldnt have paid more to have their stores cleaned. But if Safeway had been required to raise their employees' salaries, the executives of Safeway wouldn't have suffered. The share price probably would have.

In Seattle, I think the minimum wage increase that will take place over the next 5 years is on some sort of sliding scale, by company size. I suppose that is an attempt to address this particular issue.