The bigger disparity is actually in wealth (assets). The top 1% owns about 35% of the nation's wealth, and their annual income accounts for about 22%. It is really true that once you reach a certain level of wealth, money makes more money. It grows much faster than your regular salary/wage. Not that we should blame the wealthy people for being wealthy, but the disparity is really the natural consequence of unrestricted capitalism. In order for the majority of population not to suffer too much, some sort of balance between capitalism and socioeconomic equality should be established.

The core issue is something called Moore's law.

Basically it says that within the silicone industry real production in terms of utility per dollar is increasing by a factor of 2 every 1.5 years.  Thats between 58% and 59% growth every year for the last 40 years.  If you are involved in this small segment of industry you get massively wildly rich.  Microsoft, HP, apple, facebook, paypal, amazon, ebay, intel, google etc.  And the problem is that the entire wealth of these industries is encapsolated down to a few thousand or tens of thousand people who COULD EASILY TAKE THEIR TOYS AND GO PLAY SOMEWHERE ELSE.  

If you want to talk about the kennedy's, rockafellers or other rich families who are not actively "earning" their money then thats one thing.  Estate tax or some form of tax that increses with the length of time a family has been rich so Kennedy Jr would pay more than Kennedy Sr and would have to provide new value or lose the empire over time.  But if you want to talk about the Steve Jobs types as though they stole money from the occupy New York kids thats something different.

The real villians here are the WORKERS at the financial institutions.  Its the stock brokers who actually start out not rich and manage to skim MASSIVE amounts of money from granny while making her 5-6% which any computer program could easily have done by investing in the S&P 500 and adjusting quarterly.  Thats who needs to be limited.  

Steve Jobs owned 7 Billion dollars and lived in 1 house.  Stock brokers make 1 million a year and spend half of it on consumption.  In theory Jobs is thousands and thousands of times richer than me, but in practice he maybe spends 20 times more than me, In theory the broker is maybe 10-20 times richer than me but they spend 10-20 times more money on comsumption.  Controlling money doesn't rob people of things in general, but consumption does.  If Jobs bought 7 billion dollars of gold my life is unaffected unless my passion is hording gold.  If 10,000 stock brokers are willing to pay high rents in NYC then the protestors there can't afford to stay in a hotel because of the realestate realities.

The real problem in this nation is that CEOs who are workers not owners have started paying themselves such high salaries when in most cases they don't actually add that kind of value.  The simple fix is to make corporate taxes such that anyone paying an employee more than the US president in sallary gets a 10% tax penalty unless they have a 70:1 ratio between highest paid and lowest paid employee or something like that.  The market would fix that problem in a heart beat.

That brings back fairness.  Its fair for the janitor at google to get rich too.  But you can't hold back the googles of the world or they will simply move to the bahamas and gut your tax base.  Protect the ones who actually add value and penalize the ones who really don't.  And don't get confused about those who are holding but never spending money that isn't really competing with your consumption.

VKL, great post!

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