inequality:
Yesterday, on a day the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 13,000 for the first time, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll disclosed that only 22 percent believe the nation is headed in the right direction.
(...) We look, though, at the disparity in wages, between the economic elite and the mass of Americans ("Income inequality grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans--those with incomes that year of more than $348,000--receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows." NY Times, March 29, 2007) and believe that something else is going on.
(...) In Nation this week, William Greider interviews economist Ralph Gomory who explains, "America... becomes increasingly dependent, buying from abroad more and more of what its citizens consume and producing relatively less at home. US incomes stagnate as the high-wage jobs disappear and US exports become a smaller share of the world total."
(...) It is not just the issue of wage disparity: that the "the top 1 percent (of income earners) recieved 21.8 percent of all reported income in 2005, up significantly from the 19.8 percent the year before and more than double their share of income in 1980. The peak was in 1928, when the top 1 percent reported 23.9 percent of all income." We all know what happened in 1928.