In the past thirty years the after-tax earnings of the top one percent of income earners in the United States increased by nearly 300%. For the 60% of the population earning "middle" income salaries during that same period, after-tax incomes went up less than 40%.

Sounds bad, but it's even worse than that.

Note the after-tax incomes of the wealthiest 1% INCREASED by nearly 300%. That is NOT the same as saying their incomes "tripled." It really means those incomes have nearly quadrupled.

[For those of us who have forgotten our 7th grade math, here's the ciphering: if one starts at a salary of $1 million a year, and gets a raise of $3 million a year, that's a 300% INCREASE. But the resulting $4 million is FOUR times the original $1 million salary.]

If the rising tide of disposable income truly floated all boats that might be just fine . . . but it doesn't float them, and it's not only not fine, it's dangerous. To find out why, those of us who are inclined to enjoy the musings of socio-economic theorists of note might take a whack at Piketty, or Schiller, or Greenspan . . . or do our own math . . . or just look around.

Assume that thirty years ago your after-tax income was $40K per year.

Assume that at the same time your top-one-percent boss was earning only 10 times more per year than you were. He now earns 28.6 times what you earn. (40k times 1.4 equals 56k. 400k times 4 equals 1600k. 1600k divided by 56k equals 28.6.)

For most, if not all of us, that seems somehow out of line.

At one level it simply presses what Jonathan Haidt describes as the "injustice" button in the primitive portions of our brains that drive what we once called "gut feelings" about what's right and wrong. It's the same set of instincts that led us to be the social animals we are; maintain extended family and social relationships; and celebrate "what's right" by creating laws, governments, religions, and the first five episodes of The Lone Ranger.

It is antithetical to the very notion of a democratic society.

For most of those in the generation that experienced the Great Depression and some or all of two world wars, such inequity was not only unthinkable in theory . . . but rarely if ever the case in practice. Check out the ratios of employer vs employee pay scales in that period.

Defenders of the virtues of income inequality of course claim that, in the long run, it drives innovation and provides incentives for hard work and wealth production. More serious analysts, including French economist Thomas Piketty, believe that it is an inherent part of capitalism and, in the long run, a genuine threat to capitalism itself, not to mention our form of capitalist democracy.

I tend to side with John Maynard Keynes about such things. On the basis of years of research, analysis, and personal experience, Keynes wisely pointed out that in the long run, we're all dead.

In the short run, of course, most of us are increasingly frustrated, and furious and, in all too many cases, looking for hope in all the wrong places. History is filled with the beasts who slouch toward Bethlehem to be born in eras marked by hopelessness, rage, or both.

Happily, most modern theorists believe that the inequities of modern capitalism can be remedied: not by irrational faith, or by some inescapable laws-of-history-driven revolution, but by the actions of rational people, inherently decent, social animals, working together.

Unfortunately the image of the most powerful institution willing and capable of effecting such changes -- government -- is at an all-time low in the United States, where income inequality is at higher levels than any time in our own history, and higher than among all the other ostensibly "developed" nations on the planet.

In the face of such inequality, those who ignore it, or trivialize it, or blame its victims, or evangelize the gospels of weak government sow the seeds of their and our destruction.

In the long run, of course, we are, indeed, all dead.

But in the meantime, for all too many of us (and for all too many of those who will follow us), a failure to address income inequality is not only short-sighted, it is immoral . . . leaving, as it does, all too many of our fellow citizens maimed and dying on the beach they should never have been required to storm.