Americans’ income from capital gains, after the stock market crash, fell 40 percent in 2008, while their overall earnings fell 3.7 percent, the IRS has stated.

The preliminary data issued yesterday by The Internal Revenue Service, showed Americans reported $447 billion from capital gains in 2008, down from $749 billion in 2007, the last year of an economic expansion.

The data marked the first comprehensive look at the Great Recession’s toll on U. S. incomes.

It was in 2008 that Americans reported the first overall income drop since 2002. The data shows that earnings from taxable unemployment compensation rose to $43.9 billion, up by 7.6 percent from 2007.

Americans paid $1 trillion in income taxes, a 6.2 percent dip from a year earlier.

Joel Slemrod, an economics professor who runs a tax-policy research institute at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, said, “This is a stark and fresh look at the ramifications of the stock market crash on the fiscal situation in the federal government and states”.

The IRS said that “just under 4.4 million households earned more than $200,000 in 2008, approximately the level of income that would be subject to tax increases proposed by President Barack Obama”.