"The top 1 percent have been getting an ever-increasing share of gross national income, so their share of gross national taxed income...people who aren't in tha

"The top 1 percent have been getting an ever-increasing share of gross national income, so their share of gross national taxed income...people who aren't in that top tier have seen their real wages fall consistently since the 1980s." Actually, I find this side of the argument to fall under the heading of "lies, damn lies, and statistics." The problem with this argument is that it conflates "population segment" with "particular individuals." You see that the top one percent get a larger share and conclude that the rich keep getting richer while everyone else gets poorer. If those population segments were static, this would be true. In reality, these groups are very dynamic and people move between them throughout their lives, so when you look at "the bottom twenty percent" over a multi-decade period, you're not looking at a fifth of the population permanently trapped at the bottom of the totem pole, you're looking at many different people starting out in that position before moving up. Certainly some of them are stuck there, but most of them aren't. The top 1% is extremely volatile: I don't have any statistics handy but I have read more than once that the percentage of the top 1% who were up there ten years prior has fallen dramatically since the '70s. It's not the same people getting richer, it's new people (who used to be well below that top tier) getting even richer than the last set of top earners. As an example, consider a typical middle-class American family: they start out as two individuals fresh out of college each earning thirty or forty thousand dollars a year: nowhere near the top 1%. As they gain experience they begin to earn more and more each year, moving up into higher earning segments. At some point they meet each other and get married, dramatically increasing their "household" income (and creating difficulties for economists trying to make apples-to-apples comparisons). In their fifties they hit their peak earning years and spend half a decade or so in the highest tax bracket: not in the top 1% of earners, but probably in the top 10% or some other arbitrary slice frequently villified as earning more than their "fare share" of income. Then their income tapers off as they transition into retirement and they fall back into the next quintile down, maybe even two quintiles down. For their entire working lives prior to retirement they saw their income grow steadily, but by taking a snapshot of their income when they were twenty-five and comparing it to the income of twenty-five year-olds from three decades earlier you come to the conclusion that "people" are earning less than they used to. I'd like to see some statistics on lifetime real compensation (not just income, but ALL compensation). I'd be willing to bet that it would show that the middle class has done quite well by themselves in the last three decades.