Income inequality problems are a matter of percentages, not dollars

This is a subject I have addressed before, so I promise not to be long-winded about it.

The growing income equality in the United States is one of the biggest problems facing our country.

It isn't just hard numbers, either. It isn't just that there are far more billionaires than there used to be.

The real problem is that the folks at the top of the ladder have been accruing a higher and higher percentage of the national wealth.

We have reached the point where the top 1 percent own about a third of all our wealth. Go back 50 or 60 years and they had less than 10 percent. So even if we were to change our income tax policies tomorrow back to what they were in the 1950s, there isn't anything in those policies that would take things back to where they were. Most of the wealth in their hands isn't income, and the massive reductions in the estate tax will mean most of it never gets touched.

So our tendency to moderate our policies makes it nearly impossible to solve the problem created by the Reagan tax cut of 1986 that lowered the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent.

Additional policies lowering taxes on capital gains only made things worse. Most folks never have sufficient capital gains for it to make a difference.

Nearly every tax policy from Reagan onward only made income equality worse.

This is no longer the country those of us who came of age in the '50s and '60s grew up in.

And that country isn't coming back.

It isn't about hard dollars, it's about percentages.

And our rich friends aren't giving any of it back. The only way to get it back is going to be to take it.

Where are Bonnie and Clyde when we really need them?