Wall Street experts can tell you how the rich are making out like bandits while many Americans are getting poorer

I’ve been surprised at how many of the little grasshoppers think it is just fine that our upward-redistributionist tax policies are enabling the super-rich to take an increasingly disproportionate share of wealth from the U.S. system. Anyone who isn’t bothered by the current extreme income inequality in this country needs to read the new piece by my friend Timothy Noah in the New Republic on the subject. Noah’s an expert on the subject, but the most striking part of the column is the quotes he collects from investment bankers. To wit:

Michael Cembalest, the chief investment officer of JPMorgan Chase, wrote in July of this year . . . . that "profit margins have reached levels not seen in decades," and "reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement." . . . "US labor compensation," he explained, "is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP."

. . . "The upper classes of this country raped this country" is one of the more polite things that Morgan Stanley money manager Steve Eisman has to say on the eve of the 2008 sub-prime fiasco.

. . . "We now have a Gini index similar to the Philippines and Mexico," a Proctor & Gamble vice president told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, referring to a measure of income distribution.

And it isn’t like Tim is cherry-picking The Wall Street Journal (where I labored for 17 years, btw, back before the newspaper was taken over by alien beings.) You can find this stuff almost as random, as I did with this weekend column by Al Lewis that I read over my eggs in a diner last Sunday: "median household income is 7.1% lower than it was in 1999. . . . The clear trend-even before the recession began-is that more Americans are getting poorer."

I remember reading somewhere that Argentina was the first nation ever to move from the First World to the Third World. We should heed that example.