It's not that you envy and despise the rich, you say. You just wish they didn't have so much while the rest of have to do with less and less.
But you're buying into the myth of household-income stagnation. The truth is that all Americans are much better off than we used to be, including the poorest Americans:
Yes, the income share of the bottom 20 percent of households shrank from 4.1% in 1970 to 3.4% in 2006. But so what? That is 3.4 percent of a pie three times as large as the pie of 1970. If you adjust that for growth in the number of households, the average income of households in the bottom 20 percent has risen by 36% since 1970.
John Edwards and his "two Americas" are out of the picture, thank goodness, but there's plenty of economic dimwittery left in this presidential race.
