I agree that the wealth gap is offtopic on this thread. Thought about starting a new topic, but I didn't want to just abandon this one. I think it's worth another exchange on this thread, then if we seem to have momentum, then maybe we should restart with a new topic.

As soon as you say "the general trend all around has been upward", you open yourself to different interpretations of the data. Note the weasel word "generally" (sorry, can't help riffing; besides, this is Flame). First, "generally" sweeps under the carpet the two eras in which it was literally true that while the rich got richer, the poor really did get poorer. You'll recognize the date ranges, and understand why many people see a correlation between economic ideology and outcome.

The other problem with "generally" is that it glosses over the one-and-a-half orders of magnitude difference in the income growth rate between the extremes of wealth in this country. You might think that's an insignificant difference, but I suspect not a lot of other people will go along with that interpretation. 16% and 281% are not "generally" in the same ballpark. That is a real and dramatic difference in outcome. Can you explain it by arguing that the top 1% is 15 times smarter or works 15 times harder or that their day is 360 hours long?

The old chestnut "a rising tide lifts all boats" strongly implies linearity--that's how water behaves, and the proverb makes a point of saying "all". Something's wrong with our economic system when it produces wildly nonlinear results.

That's economic populism: Reward proportional to effort. Sounds like a workable definition of "fairness" to me.