“If you think again in percentage terms, so the top 20 percent, as I said, have 85 percent of the wealth, most Americans want them to have roughly 35 percent of the wealth. You’re talking about 50 percent of all the wealth in the United States, which as you can imagine is a very, very large number. People would like that to be more evenly distributed across people with less income.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130395070
I am sure that some people are going to call Harvard and NPR a “liberal source” and dismiss all the facts, but for those who pay attention and do a little research on their own, I will persist.
Most people want a more equal distribution of wealth, whether they realize it or not. Not many just want to take the money from the rich and give it to the poor, that is UnAmerican. People would like for “the market” to be a bit more fair and balanced. Right now, the TRUTH is that wealth doesn’t change hands. The US dream of rags-to-riches does happen – but not very often and much less often than people think. The same families keep the same amount of wealth (generally speaking) through generations. Only these days, those “with” are getting more and those “without” are getting much less.
Basically, “the market” is failing miserably to regulate itself. Money gushes up, trickles down and stagnates. When the top 20% control 85% of the wealth, we have only 15% of our national wealth actually working inside our economy. The rich horde and collect it and they are very good at building wealth. Unfortunately, that is destroying the economy that allows them to build it in the first place. Concentrating wealth away from the consumer base is simply bad business.
We have two choices. First choice is for the wealthy to take action, create jobs, pay their workers really well and get us back on track. Second choice is to have another Great Depression to correct the wealth and income gaps. I suppose government could step in and tax and penalize the rich into doing the right thing, but nobody wants that.