Your question Flintite, will the disparity ever bother me assumes that it does not bother me now. It does. However, where I differ with the progressives is in what has caused the disparity and what is the solution to providing a method for those on the bottom of the scale to raise their incomes. The following limit the opportunity to grow your income if you are currently near the bottom:

1. The federal government has not taken sufficient steps to enforce anti-monopoly laws.
2. The federal government has gone way to far in implementation of a public safety net.
3. The voters have allowed congress to manipulate the tax code to benefit the more affluent and powerful in our country.
4. The voters have allowed congress to interfere with capitalism with subsidies and bailouts and manipulate social justice.
4. The voters have allowed politicians to formulate policy that minimizes the role of family and community in favor of increasing the role of the federal government.

The results of these actions has caused:

1. A workforce that is not motivated to improve their lot.
2. Voters who are dependent on the government to the point where they will not support public policy that is good for the country as a whole because it may negatively affect their income in the short-term.
3. Citizens who will not look out for the needs of each other, even their own families, because there is a government bureaucracy that is supposed to do that.
4. A business environment that must consider tax & regulatory issues above sound economic decisions.

I do not believe our capitalistic society has caused a disparity in income. I believe the loss of our capitalistic society has caused it and a return to it is the solution to raise the lower incomes instead of trying to lower the top incomes. Some of the current republican candidates are pushing some of these issues.

1. Balanced budget amendment.
2. Repeal of the current tax code in favor of a flat tax.

Thanks for asking.

http://www.occasionalplanet.org/2011/11/04/49-think-gop-is-sabotaging-the-economy-just-to-defeat-obama/

This is a different M.O. from the true conservatives of the past.

“”There was a time when I was reporting on Congress, that I admired, respected and even liked some of the most stalwart conservatives in the Senate. But that was before the conservatives of the Republican Party metamorphosed into a rancid rabble of radicals who seek to cripple a president, the federal government and the Constitution of the United States.”’

http://tinyurl.com/3kohp9t

There’s nothing partisan about a road or a bridge or an airport; Democrats and Republicans have voted to spend billions on them for decades and long supported rebuilding plans in their own states. On Thursday, though, when President Obama’s plan to spend $60 billion on infrastructure repairs came up for a vote in the Senate, not a single Republican agreed to break the party’s filibuster….

…read the article here- New York Times

Of course the definition of poor is different around the world, but I don’t understand how this relates to the value of a human being. This discussion is turning wacky.

I do not take issue with the study. I take issue with calling the bottom 20% poor soley because they are in the bottom 20%. An earlier point I was trying to make is that the definition of poor keeps changing. It is certainly different here than it is in India. Are the people over there less valuable human beings? Maybe we should take care of them.

Steve- a touching video. A single mom that cannot afford to eat that traveled from Minnisota to D.C. to make a speech in which she did not offer a single solution to what she called social injustice. A big social injustice is asking the general populace to enable people to make decisions that will keep them in poverty.

How about this from the Washington Post written in September: “Nearly one in six Americans was living in poverty last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, a development that is ensnaring growing numbers of children and offering vivid proof of the recession’s devastating impact.”

That’s 16.7%, creeping up very close to the 20% that you’re emphasizing. 16.7% of Americans live in poverty!

As James Lindsay points out on CNN.com/GPS:
“What does economic inequality in the United States look like compared to the rest of the world? To answer that question you need to know a bit about the Gini coefficient, the most common metric economists use to measure inequality. The Gini coefficient runs on a scale from zero to one, with zero indicating total equality and one indicating total inequality (that is, one person has all the income and everyone else has nothing). Based on data from 2005, the last year for which comparable data are publicly available, the United States had one of the highest levels of income inequality among OECD nations.”