The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson admitted Sunday that he’s had the idea of the exponential income inequality of the top 1% of Americans all wrong. Citing recent analyses of the financial gains of the top earners in America, Thompson explained that almost all of the upward movement decried by the Left is in the top .1 percent. The earning increases of the other .9 percent of the hated “one-percenters” have remained relatively flat, mirroring the rest of Americans.

For years, I've been making the same embarrassing mistake about U.S. economic inequality. Sorry.

I've written, over and over, that the most important divide in our wealth disparity was between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. For example, when I compared the evolution in investment income since the late 1970s, I often imagined a graph like this from the Economic Policy Institute, showing the 1 percent flying away from the rest of the country.

But as Thompson pointed out, graphs like that one, which he and the Left had been using for years, are "somewhat misleading" because they make it appear that the 1 percent "is a group of similar households accelerating from the rest of the economy." He stated, "Nothing could be further from the truth."

The truth, Thompson found, is that almost all of the upward movement has been isolated in a fraction of the “one-percenters,” the top .1 percent of Americans. Here is the income inequality chart of the 1 percent broken into more specific measures:

Thompson explained that this information can be further subdivided to reveal that “the gain in wealth share is all about the top 0.1 percent of the country." He added that while the top .9 hasn’t seen much change since the 1960s, “the 0.01 percent has essentially quadrupled its share of the country's wealth in half a century.”

Thompson provided the following graph by economist Amir Sufi to demonstrate his point:

Thompson summarized his findings by arguing that the truly significant income inequality is not focused around the top 1 percent, as he and others on the Left have argued, but has in fact been created by an ultra-elite few, comprised of bankers and CEOs who are “riding the stock market to pick up extraordinary investment income.”