I used to think that income inequality...

...was okay so long as the pie was growing. Who cares if the rich are getting richer, as long as the poor and middle class are getting richer, too?

But what happens if the pie isn't getting bigger, like in the last ten years? Steven Pearlstein writes:

 By 2007, the top 1 percent of households took home 23 percent of the national income after a 15-year run in which they captured more than half - yes, you read that right, more than half - of the country's economic growth. As Tim Noah noted recently in a wonderful series of articles in Slate, that's the kind of income distribution you'd associate with a banana republic or a sub-Saharan kleptocracy, not the world's oldest democracy and wealthiest market economy.