rich poor gap
is at its highest level in a very long time. well duh. let me see. someone predicted this would happen. course you can always argue about how it's impossible to actually measure the rich poor gap. which might be true. but it's pretty easy to show that the incomes of the rich are going one way and the incomes of the non-rich are going the other way. so yeah even though i can't actually define the rich poor gap to your satisfaction i'm damn sure it's growing. so your next argument is that that's good. the rich always recover from a recession first. and the bottom follows the top. except every recession the bottom falls further and further behind. your solution is to cut taxes for the rich. which is a death spiral. many of the richest folks in america can see the wave breaking. they can see the foundation crumbling under them. and they're dumping huge chunks of their wealth back into the middle class. which seems good. but unless that money actually reaches the bottom... yeah. ouch. we need to re-establish a progressive tax system. and we need to expand our energy base as soon as possible. or we need to cut the world's population. your pick.