Income inequality, like anything else in life, is fine in moderation. Like I said before, you don’t want to pay the barista the same wage as the brain surgeon. But never in 100 years have we had so much income concentrated into so few hands. That’s a receipe for revolution, and not necessarily the kind we want.
New report debunks narrative on income inequality
http://www.laffercenter.com/2012/07/lefts-dubious-history-income-inequality/
The Latest News on Tax Fairness-top 20%’s share up, everyone else’s share down over last 30 years
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444873204577537250318931044.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
If fairness in paying taxes means the amount you pay is based on the amount you make, then the only group in America paying at least a “fair share” is the top 20%—people who make more than $74,000. For everyone else, the tax code is a bargain.
I would posit that what is harmful is not a large ratio between the 99th percentile and 1st percentile, but rather the existence of an excessively large ratio between any two consecutive percentiles or fractions thereof. I would consider a distribution in which the top person's has 1,000 times as much as someone at the bottom of the 99th percentile (who is still better than 99% of the population), who in turns has only twice as much as the bottom, to be regarded as far more dangerously skewed than one in which each percentile has 1.2 times the wealth of the one below, even though the latter would have an 82,000,000:1 ratio between the top and bottom percentiles while the former would only have a 2,000:1 ratio.
Obama and other leftists would prefer the former distribution (with themselves and their cronies being in the wealthy-elite group); conservatives would prefer the latter.