If you think the rich keep getting richer and most other Ohioans keep treading financial water, a new study says you're right.

Annual average income for the top 1 percent of Ohio households, adjusted for inflation, climbed by more than 40 percent during the past 18 years, hitting $986,000 in 2006, according to "The State of Working Ohio 2007," a report released today by Policy Matters Ohio, a liberal-leaning, non-partisan research institute based in Cleveland.

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On average, these top-earning households took in more than 26 times what middle-income Ohio households did in 2006, the report says.

"At a time when Ohio is struggling financially, it's a little jarring to find this huge increase" for Ohio's wealthiest, said Amy Hanauer, Policy Matters Ohio executive director and author of the report.

The report also found that, while the top 20 percent of individual wage earners in Ohio have seen significant increases in inflation-adjusted income since 1979, the remaining 80 percent of workers made no real gains or lost ground.

David Hansen, president of the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, a conservative-leaning Columbus-based nonpartisan research institute, said the income gains for top-earning households were the "rewards for education and risk-taking." He said the findings are misleading because some business owners include business income as part of their individual federal income tax filing.

The report has bright spots. The wage gap between men and women is the smallest ever and the state's median wage increased slightly from 2005 to 2006 for the second year in a row, in contrast to declines between 2000 and 2004.

Underlying the report, however, was the state's dismal showing in generating jobs. Ohio has 158,000 fewer jobs than the state did when the last recession began in March of 2001. The report was based on analysis of federal data by Policy Matters Ohio and two other research groups – the Economic Policy Institute and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2437 or

jdebrosse@DaytonDailyNews.com.