One of the great myths of the 1980s is that "the rich got richer and the poor got poorer". That there was a massive transfer of wealth from the "poor" to the "rich".
Well there was!
But This data disproves one of the associated myths: that the rich got richer at the expense of the poor. The mechanism of that statistical transfer was individual people getting richer.

The table below is from a study that tracked individuals who filed with the IRS in both 1979 and 1988. Fully 65% of the people in the poorest quintile in 1979 moved up at least two quintiles during the interval and 85.7% moved up at least one quintile.

Note that of those that started the study in the bottom income quintile, at the end of the study slightly more of them were in the top quintile than remained in the bottom (by 14.7% to 14.2%).

Source: The Wall Street Journal; Tuesday, June 2, 1992, Page A2, and plagerized from the Reagan Home Page

Up and Down: Income-Group Mobility 1979-1988
Status in 1979	Status in 1988
	Top 1%	Next 19%	Next 20%	Middle 20%	Next 20%	Bottom 20%
Top 1%	47.3	38.6	7.7	3.8	0.4	2.2
Top 2%-20%	5.3	59.4	20.3	9.4	4.4	1.1
Next Richest 20%	0.6	34.8	37.5	14.8	9.3	3.1
Middle 20%	0.4	14.6	32.3	33.0	14.0	5.7
Next Poorest 20%	0.3	10.8	19.5	29.6	29.0	10.9
Poorest 20%	0.3	14.4	25.3	25.0	20.7	14.2

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