LEWISTON – In comparing income growth over the past three decades, no group made out better than the rich, said Thursday’s speaker at the Great Falls Forum.

In 2005, income for the bottom fifth of U.S. earners had risen 6 percent over the previous 26 years. The middle fifth saw an increase of 21 percent; and the top fifth, an 80 percent increase.

But the top 1 percent – America’s highest earners – got an increase that was beyond compare: 228 percent.

That income-growth pattern was different in the years immediately following WWII, when the middle class grew strong, said Christopher St. John, executive director of the Maine Center for Economic Policy.

“We had two dramatically different periods in American policy,” he said.

From 1946 to 1979, federal laws made many households financially secure and provided more income equality.

But in the 1980s, there was a shift. Beginning with the Reagan administration, the political environment was skeptical, even hostile, toward policies that provided a safety net for the poor and shored up the middle class, St. John said.

For example, in the 1970s, the Farmers Home Administration financed half of new home construction in Maine. With the Reagan cutbacks, that financing almost disappeared, St. John said.

The current recession has been hard on all income groups, he said.

“But people who have been suffering with incomes not keeping pace for basic necessities are going to have a worse time.”

If they find themselves suddenly unemployed, home foreclosures in Maine will climb, he said.

In recent months there has been a change in thinking: that government should have a role in stabilizing the economy and in passing policies that help the middle class.

In its “Getting to the Middle” report (www.mecep.org), the Maine Center for Economic Policy offers 17 recommendations.

One is passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it as easy to organize a union as to decertify one, St. John said.

Another is increasing the minimum wage at the state and national levels.

A third is passage of the Economic Recovery Act being debated in Congress. St. John disagrees with many parts of that bill, and the cost is “astonishing,” – $750 to $800 billion, he said. “But it could be very beneficial to Maine, in all kinds of ways.”

The act would increase Medicaid funding to the states and provide more for unemployment benefits. It also would create “shovel-ready” jobs – road and bridge projects – energy efficiency and health technology.

But if the states only cut services, “they will take out of the economy every single penny that the federal government puts into it. It would completely cancel the benefit of the Economic Recovery Act,” St. John said.

Some economists have concluded a better alternative would be to increase taxes on upper-income households and nonresidents.

“Not a happy message,” St. John said.