Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, attributed the drop in average incomes to “the significant wrenching hits that our economy took in 2001 and 2002, so no one should be surprised that what a bubble economy created in the late 1990s and 2000, where economic data were skewed, would take some time to recover.”
Mr. Fratto said the fact that nearly all of the growth in incomes was among those in the upper reaches of the income ladder and that the majority of investment tax breaks went to those making more than $1 million “is not a very interesting story.”

David Cay Johnston's story in the New York Times includes the following notes based on 2005 data from the IRS:

3.2 million fewer Americans, or 5 1/2%, report making less than $25 K per year.

I'd wonder whether that was a good thing, given that certain incomes are so low you don't have to file a tax return at all.

(I know this because in 2000 my income qualified for exemption, and I had a federal job for six months that year.)

Nearly 1/2 of American taxpayers report incomes less than $30k.

Hmm. Wonder how many of those taxpayers earned minimum wage? From the Department of Labor's tables

there were not as many, again in 2002, as had reported this income every year since tracking began in 1979.

So, if you were making $5.15 an hour and working 35 hours a week during 2002 and you worked for 50 weeks, your income was $9,012.

Of American taxpayers, 2/3 make less than $50K annually.
In a household in 2002, that could include up to four full-time wage earners who made minimum wage.

Between 2000 and 2005, American taxpayers reporting incomes above $100K grew by nearly 3.4 million

Taxpayers reporting incomes above $100k accounted for over 2/3 of the growth in the number of returns filed in 2005 compared with those in 2000.

Now IANAS, but I would bet good money that the 3.4 million folks who are now reporting over 100K in annual income do not include a substantial number of the same people who previously reported making less than 25k annually. There aren't that many six-figure lottery incomes out there.

People with incomes over a million dollars also received 62 percent of the savings from the reduced tax rates on long-term capital gains and dividends that President Bush signed into law in 2003, according to a separate analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, a group that points out policies that it says favor the rich.

The group’s calculations showed that 28 percent of the investment tax cut savings went to just 11,433 of the 134 million taxpayers, those who made $10 million or more, saving them almost $1.9 million each. Over all, this small number of wealthy Americans saved $21.7 billion in taxes on their investment income as a result of the tax-cut law.

The nearly 90 percent of Americans who make less than $100,000 a year saved on average $318 each on their investments. They collected 5.3 percent of the total savings from reduced tax rates on investment income.

But the White House doesn't think this is a very interesting story.

Odd, that.

Of course, Bush makes $400 K a year ... so that puts him up there in the tax-break-blessed fraction, doesn't it?