Why Income Inequality Suddenly Matters (Salon.com)

Among the many repercussions of the Occupy Wall Street movement is the fact that local reporters are talking more frequently about “income inequality,” highlighting the difference in the way the upper and lower classes live. A reality of the recession that has been building since the 1960s, income inequality means that the opportunity to become upwardly mobile in our country has diminished, which, in fact, is true. A recently released paper by the Federal Reserve shows that a family’s position at the end of the 2000s was “more correlated with its start position than was the case 20 years earlier.” One solution? Return to the slightly higher tax rates of the Reagan and Clinton eras, suggests author, radio host, and Salon.com columnist David Sirota.