One of the taboos in Washington is pointing out the the economic injustice of the haves and have mores compared to the rest of the people in this country.

The unequal distribution of wealth is a topic that is dismissed as class warfare by the wealthy few, many of them in Congress and the White House who also support the gazillionaire corporate cronies who control them, and most vociferously by the GOP.

But the reality is that there is a skewed wealth distribution which is causing a crisis in this country.

David Barber writes at HNN:

"American society’s fantastically skewed distribution of wealth stands as one of the main structural fault lines underpinning the Crash.  America’s richest one percent of the population own over forty percent of America’s wealth—exclusive of home ownership—in this, the most opulent society history has ever known.  On the other hand, the bottom sixty percent of Americans own approximately one percent of all of America’s wealth.

"That is, if we picture an auditorium with one hundred people and one hundred seats, the single richest person would be able to spread out smartly over nearly forty-three seats.  The poorest sixty people in the auditorium would have to make due squeezing into a single seat. 

"This mal-distribution of wealth does not bode well for a society based on the buying and selling of goods.  Our super-rich plutocrats, after all, do not need more than five or ten automobiles or five or ten homes each.  This top one percent—3 million people—certainly cannot purchase all the goods that the poorest 180 million Americans would be capable of purchasing had our society a more equal distribution of wealth. 

"And so debt has had to sustain our market economy:  the more skewed the distribution of wealth has grown over time, the more frantically has the economy been forced to create a growing array of consumer debt mechanisms....."

(My note: most of these mechanisms were scams created by the financial industry to fleece regular Americans in order to line Wall Street's pockets big time: subprime mortgages, etc.)

"When a critical mass of poor and working class Americans could no longer pay their fabulously expensive subprime mortgages and usurious credit card bills, this house of cards collapsed...."