The Rich and the Rest By Robert Samuelson

"In a democracy, there is something unsettling about great extremes of wealth and poverty. One question today is whether rich Americans are claiming too much of the economic pie. Look at the latest astonishing estimates from economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics. They find that the richest 10 percent of the population received 44 percent of the pretax income in 2005. This was the highest since the 1920s and 1930s (average: 44 percent) and much higher than from 1945 to 1980 (average: 32 percent).
But the biggest gains occurred among the richest 1 percent. Their share of pretax income has gradually climbed from 8 percent in 1980 to 17 percent in 2005. Indeed, many others in the top 10 percent seem mainly upper middle class. For example, those in the richest 90th to 95th percentiles had average incomes of about $110,000."

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