Some notes for myself: how much impact have Obama’s policies actually had on current and prospective inequality?

The main policies to consider are PPACA (the health reform) and ATRA (the fiscal cliff deal with its associated tax rise).

I’m not a fan of the Tax Foundation’s work, but their analysis of the distributional effects of Obamacare looks about right: significant benefits to the bottom half of the income distribution, paid for largely by taxes on the top few percent (the Medicare surcharge and the extra tax on investment income). The Tax Policy Center — whose work I do trust — has the Act reducing the after-tax income of the top 1 percent by 1.8 percent, the top 0.1 percent by 2.5 percent.

Meanwhile, ATRA raises taxes relative to a continuation of the Bush high-end tax cuts: after-tax income down 4.5 percent for the 1-percenters, 6.2 percent for the top 0.1 percent.

Putting this together, we have a roughly 6 percent hit to the 1 percent, around 9 to the superelite. That’s only a partial rollback of these groups’ huge gains since 1980, but it’s not trivial.