Here’s one more chart to file under “the rich are doing just fine, thank you.” We keep hearing about how the rich are somehow being persecuted, those poor folks. To hear the Fox News set tell it, the rich really have it rough these days. And yet whenever it comes time to make sacrifices, we’re always told it’s the unemployed, students, and even babies who must sacrifice — never the rich.

You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t feel too bad, though. For the last 3 decades, income for the top 5 percent has been soaring. It’s not just their income, though — it’s their income after taxes. So much for that crushing tax burden that’s forcing the rest of us to sacrifice, huh?

But wait, there’s more. The chart below shows that their after-tax income isn’t just growing, it’s becoming a larger and larger percentage of all income earned in the country. In 2007 (the latest year for which the CBO has data), the top 5 percent earned nearly 30 percent of all after-tax income. The richest Americans keep taking a bigger and bigger slice of the pie, but they have the nerve to tell the rest of us that we’re the ones who need to make sacrifices?

[Data via the Congressional Budget Office.]