Good thing Democrats control the White House, House and Senate, huh? Because we know they're working hard to correct these horrible income discrepancies!

Bueller? Anybody?

The gap between the wealthiest Americans and middle- and working-class Americans has more than tripled in the past three decades, according to a June 25 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

New data show that the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest parts of the population in 2007 was the highest it's been in 80 years, while the share of income going to the middle one-fifth of Americans shrank to its lowest level ever.

The CBPP report attributes the widening of this gap partly to Bush Administration tax cuts, which primarily benefited the wealthy. Of the $1.7 trillion in tax cuts taxpayers received through 2008, high-income households received by far the largest -- not only in amount but also as a percentage of income -- which shifted the concentration of after-tax income toward the top of the spectrum.

The average household in the top 1 percent earned $1.3 million after taxes in 2007, up $88,800 just from the prior year, while the income of the average middle-income household hovered around $55,300. While the nation's total income has grown sharply since 1979, according to the CBPP report, the wealthiest households have claimed an increasingly large share of the pie.

Arloc Sherman, a researcher for CBPP, said the income gap is expanding not because the middle class is losing income, but because the wealthiest incomes are skyrocketing.

I could almost feel bad about picking on poor Ruth Marcus, another overpaid Washington Post columnist, lawyer and true Villager (married to the head of the FTC). After all, she's probably just looking out for her boss, and Amato did just chide her yesterday.

But when you read this petulant hatchet job on Rich Trumka and progressive taxation, I think you'll understand:

This graphic depiction of income inequality is, understandably enough, at the center of Trumka's worldview, a perspective that became clear when he came to lunch last week at The Post. Growing income inequality is troubling. It would be troubling in the absence of a budget crisis. But that does not mean, as Trumka would have it, that the solution to the nation's fiscal woes is always, or only, reducing income inequality.

In short, soaking the rich gets you only so far.

Take, for example, what Trumka calls "the current deficit hysteria" and its cousin, entitlement spending. "We don't have an entitlement problem," Trumka says. "We have a revenue problem." In the world according to Trumka, no benefits need be cut, no retirement ages adjusted. Simply requiring the rich to pay a fairer share would bridge the gap.

I'm all for a more progressive tax code. But consider: The Tax Policy Center examined what it would take to avoid raising taxes on families earning less than $250,000 a year while reducing the deficit to 3 percent of the economy by decade's end. The top two rates would have to rise to 72.4 and 76.8 percent, more than double the current level. You don't have to be anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist to think this would be insane.

Amato's right: Ruth isn't one for reading history books, or she would know that in 1945, we had a 94% tax on income over $200,000. And it stayed at over 90% until 1964, when it was lowered to 77%. Of course, Republicans have been hacking away at it since then!

Or ask Trumka about whether the eligibility age for Social Security, now 62 for partial benefits, should be raised. This former coal miner -- and son and grandson of coal miners -- erupts. His father worked 44 years in the mines, suffering from black lung, "and if you had said to my dad, 'You have to work until you're 63,' that would have been a death sentence." Fair enough. Some people may need special protection.

But, an editor asks, gesturing around the gleaming conference table at the middle-aged assembly, what about those who do not work in such punishing occupations and for whom the current system would provide two, maybe three, decades of benefits? "What's wrong with that?" Trumka asks indignantly. "The rest of the world does that!" Yes, and how are things going in Greece?

Fresh from The Post, Trumka told the new fiscal responsibility commission that the best way to fix Social Security would be to raise or eliminate the cap on earnings subject to the Social Security tax.

Again, sounds simple, and raising the cap makes sense -- in isolation. But combined with other taxes on the wealthiest? The Congressional Budget Office estimated that raising the cap to cover 90 percent of earnings would raise taxes on the highest earners by 6 percent for those born in the 1960s and by 15 percent for those born in the 2000s. Add that to higher income tax rates and you're talking real money, although that change would fill only about one-third of the shortfall.

Oh, boo frickin' hoo! Why, I can hardly see through my tears. Hey Ruth, the working and middle classes have been carrying the weight for the wealthiest for a while now, and they've been making out like bandits. Are you seriously suggesting that we continue to carry the burden because... well, because you like it that way?

Finally, ask Trumka about whether generous pensions and health benefits promised to public employees remain affordable -- were they ever? -- in light of strapped state budgets. Should public employees be called on to sacrifice? Trumka fairly bursts with outrage: "Were they the ones that caused this crisis? Were they the ones that lost 20 percent of the wealth in this country?"

No, but isn't it hard to defend outsize benefits to public-sector employees when wages elsewhere are stagnant and the unemployment rate is so high? Not to Trumka. "Why is that hard to defend when a guy in a hedge fund made $4.4 billion last year?"

Guys in hedge funds make outrageous sums. Union members -- even public-sector union members -- don't. Trumka's frustration is reasonable. His one-sided, tax-the-rich reflex is not. It is the shortsighted bookend to the no-new-taxes mantra of the ideologues on the other side of this stale, and seemingly stalemated, debate.

Let's get this straight. Because you and your husband (and your bosses) are used to a certain serene lifestyle, it seems only fair that nothing disturbs it. So instead of having the rich finally start to carry a proportionate burden, you offer to split the difference with those so battered by the wealthy in the past ten years?

Really, Ruth. You should be ashamed of yourself.

The AFCSME, along with Americans United, has created the above ad targeting Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins' blocking of a vote on the Jobs Bill

"It's very simple - more jobs now mean less debt later. If Senators Snowe and Collins are truly concerned about the deficit, then they need to vote for this jobs bill - especially as unemployment hovers near ten percent, and 900,000 more workers face the threat of lay-offs," said AFSCME President Gerald McEntee.

To his credit, Krugman keeps trying to explain things clearly enough that people understand how really crazy it is to try to focus on cutting the deficit during this severe recession -- but the Republicans have done such a great job selling the idea of running the country on a household budget, I don't know how much it helps:

So America has a long-run budget problem. Dealing with this problem will require, first and foremost, a real effort to bring health costs under control — without that, nothing will work. It will also require finding additional revenues and/or spending cuts. As an economic matter, this shouldn’t be hard — in particular, a modest value-added tax, say at a 5 percent rate, would go a long way toward closing the gap, while leaving overall U.S. taxes among the lowest in the advanced world.

But if we need to raise taxes and cut spending eventually, shouldn’t we start now? No, we shouldn’t.

Right now, we have a severely depressed economy — and that depressed economy is inflicting long-run damage. Every year that goes by with extremely high unemployment increases the chance that many of the long-term unemployed will never come back to the work force, and become a permanent underclass. Every year that there are five times as many people seeking work as there are job openings means that hundreds of thousands of Americans graduating from school are denied the chance to get started on their working lives. And with each passing month we drift closer to a Japanese-style deflationary trap.

Penny-pinching at a time like this isn’t just cruel; it endangers the nation’s future. And it doesn’t even do much to reduce our future debt burden, because stinting on spending now threatens the economic recovery, and with it the hope for rising revenues.

So now is not the time for fiscal austerity. How will we know when that time has come? The answer is that the budget deficit should become a priority when, and only when, the Federal Reserve has regained some traction over the economy, so that it can offset the negative effects of tax increases and spending cuts by reducing interest rates.

Currently, the Fed can’t do that, because the interest rates it can control are near zero, and can’t go any lower. Eventually, however, as unemployment falls — probably when it goes below 7 percent or less — the Fed will want to raise rates to head off possible inflation. At that point we can make a deal: the government starts cutting back, and the Fed holds off on rate hikes so that these cutbacks don’t tip the economy back into a slump.

But the time for such a deal is a long way off — probably two years or more. The responsible thing, then, is to spend now, while planning to save later.

As I said, many politicians seem determined to do the reverse. Many members of Congress, in particular, oppose aid to the long-term unemployed, let alone to hard-pressed state and local governments, on the grounds that we can’t afford it. In so doing, they are undermining spending at a time when we really need it, and endangering the recovery. Yet efforts to control health costs were met with cries of “death panels.”

And some of the most vocal deficit scolds in Congress are working hard to reduce taxes for the handful of lucky Americans who are heirs to multimillion-dollar estates. This would do nothing for the economy now, but it would reduce revenues by billions of dollars a year, permanently.

But some politicians must be sincere about being fiscally responsible. And to them I say, please get your timing right. Yes, we need to fix our long-run budget problems — but not by refusing to help our economy in its hour of need.

A fellow blogger tipped me to this article in Business Insider that graphically represents just how wide the income gap has become. And it's simply staggering: The gap between the top 1% and everyone else hasn't been this bad since the Roaring Twenties

Go take a look at the fifteen charts. And then tell me why we place so much trust in the free market system when it's clear it only works for a small percentage of Americans.

Balloon Juice: Interesting...so is this

Mashable: FCC Turns Up the Heat in Battle for Net Neutrality

Obsidian Wings: Evil becomes banal when people -- good people -- stop recognizing it, stop appreciating it, and come to accept it as normal.

Democratic Strategist: Primaries reveal an enthusiasm gap favoring Republicans

Open Left: Living Liberally and Open Left are holding a joint fundraiser this week. Help out if you can

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: Left In Alabama, nancy nall, Techdirt

National Catholic Reporter The Pope needs to answer questions. The church now faces the largest institutional crisis in centuries, possibly in history.

Bill Moyers Journal: Dr. King's Economic Dream Deferred

The 24/7 Wall St.: Twenty Best Financial Blogs

Radamisto: These analyses are troubling

skippy the bush kangaroo: hannity inanity

Norwegianity: Lotta good links, cartoons

That is not a typo. Just $5:

Women of all races bring home less income and own fewer assets, on average, than men of the same race, but for single black women the disparities are so overwhelmingly great that even in their prime working years their median wealth amounts to only $5. [..]

See this graph of racial disparities in income

"It's rather shocking," said Meizhu Lui, director of the Closing the Gap Initiative based in Oakland, Calif., who contributed to the report "Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth and America's Future." [.pdf]

Among the most startling revelations in the wealth data is that while single white women in the prime of their working years (ages 36 to 49) have a median wealth of $42,600 (still only 61 percent of their single white male counterparts), the median wealth for single black women is only $5.

"Even for those of us who have been looking at the wealth gap for a while, we were shocked and amazed at how little women of color have," Ms. Lui said.[..]

Black women, in general, were more likely to have participated in the subprime loan crisis with upper-income black women being five times more likely to have received a high-cost mortgage than upper-income white men.

"The popular image is they spend too much, which is the reason they are running up credit card and consumer debt, but the cost of living has risen faster than income, and they need to go into debt for basic daily necessities," Ms. Lui said. "It's compounded because unemployment is twice as high in the black community than it is in the white community."

For all working-age black women 18 to 64, the financial picture is bleak. Their median household wealth is only $100. Hispanic women in that age group have a median wealth of $120. Read more

I'm dumbfounded by this study. Could there be a starker example of the haves and have-nots? Don't glide over the statistic either, that upper-income black women were FIVE times more likely to be offered a high-cost (and riskier) home loan than upper-income white men. Racial profiling home mortgages, lovely. A recent study in Pittsburgh found that 70% of African-American families are headed by single women. Families. With a median wealth of $5.

This is a larger issue than the conservatives with their flippant dismissals of "welfare queens" want to admit. The children in these households are living below poverty, with little to no safety net.

In a 2008 study of black women and their money, the ING Foundation found that black women -- who frequently manage the assets of their households -- financially support friends, family and their houses of worship to a much greater degree than the general population.

They also are more likely to be employed in jobs and industries -- such as service occupations -- with lower pay and less access to health insurance. And when their working days are done, they rely most heavily on Social Security because they are less likely to have personal savings, retirement accounts or company pensions. Their Social Security benefits are likely to be lower, too, because of their low earnings.

Rather than strictly comparing income, researchers in the Insight study looked at the wealth gap. The current economic crisis has shown that a person's wealth affects not only retirement security, but also a person's ability to handle financial setbacks such as a job loss or a health emergency.

High unemployment and high incarceration rates for black men also lower the likelihood of single black women finding a partner to help build a more secure financial future.

Ms. Lui said the Insight report would be used to encourage the government to close the wealth gap and improve the outlook for women of color, just as it did for Americans who received land through the Homestead Act, and education through the GI bill.

"If wealth was based on hard work, African-Americans would be the wealthiest people in our nation," she said. "It's not about behavior. It's about government policies. Who does the government help and who is it not helping?

That, my friends, is the question that all liberals ask and conservative ignore.

UPDATE: And to punctuate the point, we hear about the death of former legislator Juanita Goggins of South Carolina who froze to death alone in a rented home, apparently suffering from dementia and who was not discovered until two weeks later. Though she had the money, her electricity was turned off three days after she died, indicating that she had not paid her bills.

Don't panic just yet. What will almost certainly happen Tuesday is that the Senate will return in full force and pass the extension, with some kind of retroactive coverage that will bridge the gap:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Depending on extended unemployment benefits to see you through the Great Recession?

You'd better not: The Senate failed to push back the Feb. 28 deadline to apply for this safety net.

Starting Monday, the jobless will no longer be able to apply for federal unemployment benefits or the COBRA health insurance subsidy.

Federal unemployment benefits kick in after the basic state-funded 26 weeks of coverage expire. During the downturn, Congress has approved up to an additional 73 weeks, which it funds.

These federal benefit weeks are divided into tiers, and the jobless must apply each time they move into a new tier.

Because the Senate did not act, the jobless will now stop getting checks once they run out of their state benefits or current tier of federal benefits.

In October 2009, here's how Sen. Jay Rockefeller described the Medicare Advantage plans:

"It's a wasteful, inefficient program and always has been," Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) said at a recent hearing. At its core, Rockefeller added, Medicare Advantage is "stuffing money into the pockets of private insurers, and it doesn't provide any better benefits to anybody."

Yes, the for-profit add-on plans the Republicans pushed through under Bush heavily subsidize services. (So much for "pay as you go," huh?)

A study released yesterday by a major consulting firm found that premiums for Medicare Advantage plans offering medical and prescription-drug coverage jumped 14.2 percent on average in 2010, after an increase of 5.2 percent the previous year. Some 8.5 million elderly and disabled Americans are in the plans, which provide more comprehensive coverage than traditional Medicare, often at lower cost.

Lee Durrwachter, a retired chemical engineer from Grand Marais, Mich., said his premiums more than doubled this year - even though he switched plans to try to save money. "It doesn't bode well," he said. "It's unaffordable."

The Medicare findings are bad news for President Obama and his health-care overhaul that is bogged down in Congress. That is because the higher Medicare Advantage premiums for 2010 followed a cut in government payments to the private plans last year. And the Democratic bills pending in Congress call for even more cuts, which are expected to force many seniors to drop out of what has been a rapidly growing alternative to traditional Medicare.

Republicans have seized on the Medicare Advantage cuts in their campaign to derail the health-care bills, and seniors are listening. Polls show seniors are more skeptical of the legislation than the public as a whole, even though Democrats would also reinforce original Medicare by improving preventive benefits and narrowing the prescription-coverage gap.

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President Obama walked into the lion's den -- aka the House Republican caucus -- today for a blunt conversation about how to proceed with bipartisanship. Responding to a question from Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., he lashed into them for the nutty and outrageous rhetoric so many of them have indulged in the past year:

Obama: Let me say this about health care and the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues. If you look at the health care package that we've presented ... But at its core, if you look at the basic proposal that we put forward, that has an exchange so that businesses and the self-employed can buy into a pool, and can get bargaining power the same way that big companies do, the insurance reforms that I've already discussed, making sure that there's choice in competition for those that don't have health insurance -- the component parts of this thing are pretty similar to what Howard Baker, Bob Dole, and Tom Daschle proposed at the beginning of this debate last year. Now, you may not agree with Bob Dole and Howard Baker, and certainly you don't agree with Tom Daschle on much, but that's not a radical bunch.

But if you were to listen to the debate -- and frankly, how some of you went after this bill, you'd think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot! No, I mean, that's how you guys, that's how you guys presented it. And so I'm thinking to myself, 'Well, how is it that a plan that is pretty centrist' -- no, look, I'm just sayin', I know you guys disagree, but if you look at the facts of this bill, most independent observers would say this is actually what many Republicans -- it's similar to what many Republicans proposed to Bill Clinton when he was doing his debate on health care.

So all I'm saying is, we've got to close the gap between the rhetoric and the reality. I'm not suggesting that we're going to agree on everything, whether it's on health care or energy or what have you. But if the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don't have a lot of room to negotiate with me.

I mean, the fact of the matter is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your home base, in your own party. You've given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion, because what you've been telling your constituents is. 'This guy's doin' all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America!'

No doubt he was thinking of, among others, Blackburn herself. Her question to Obama was fairly straightforward and non-nutty, but when she's been out in the public, this is a woman who has defended the notion that the health-care bill contained "death panels," claimed the bill was "sacrificing our children's future," and joined the Tea Partiers in demanding "we want our country back."

But it's not just House Republicans who need to hear this. Some media folks need to be getting this message too.