I mean that as scary as things seemed in December of '08, most Americans' incomes hadn't actually declined that much. They would later, but that's the point. The wealthy had already seen a huge income hit. Based purely on choosing your window to match a market rally or a crash, you can create the kind of disparate income impact statistics that Saez trumpets.
You're the one choosing a window to make a point. 2008 was the worst year for the wealthy, but also the only bad bad year. 2007 they saw record gains and those were mostly recovered by 2010. Jobs and housing has yet to recover.
Yes, its like 3 days before his accident, the man was perfectly happy. Although, in this case, replace accident with losing his job/livlihood. And the handwriting was on the wall, for the executives, as of 9/08 and what happened to Lehman. And from there the shit flows downstream...
