Entitlements are killers in several ways, and the most intractable is that their size is tied not only to population growth but to the economic circumstances of the population. Benefits have been cut back steadily since the mid-90s, yet the total expenditures are up. How effective would it be to just keep cutting benefits? Well, Jonathon Swift might've modestly observed that "it'd be really effective if they're cut below the starvation level, now wouldn't it?", but I'm not ready to accuse you Republicans of that much naked brutality. Not yet anyway. There may still be time to turn you around.

The reality is, poverty's up, employment's down. Nothing else is going to work right until we address the root problems.

Some of them can't be addressed, like aging (though if ever the government's going to release their secret anti-aging treatment, now would be a good time to do it).

That leaves finding gainful employment for the able-bodied and reversing the trend of downward mobility. So far we've tried and found wanting the prescriptions of general tax cuts and trickle-down economics (special tax cuts for the wealthy). The only remaining factor we can influence is the distribution of wealth.

You could legitimately protest about income redistribution if the gap between rich and poor had been static in America the last few decades, but in fact it's grown dramatically.

There has been a dramatic upward shift in income over the last few decades, coupled with a growing gap between those at the very top and those at the bottom of the income scale. In fact, inequality has grown far more in the United States over the last three decades than at any time in the last century, and far more than in any other advanced country.

Using some data from NBER researchers Thomas Pikkety and Emanuel Saez, it is possible to illustrate how large both the income redistribution and the scale of inequality in America have become:

* The top 1% of families earned 9.3% of all income in 1980. By 2000, this income share had increased to 19.6%. Correspondingly, the income share of the bottom 90% declined from 66% to 53.9%. There were small gains (1.9 percentage points) in the income shares of the remaining group, the 90th to 99th percentiles.
* From 1980 to 2000, the incomes of the upper 1% increased 179%, while those of the bottom 90% increased by only 8%.
* In 1970, the ratio of top executive earnings to that of the average worker was 38.6 to 1. This ratio increased to 101.1 by 1980, to 222 by 1990, and to 1,046 in 1999.

Because of this inequality, low-income families in the United States are not better off than low-income families in some countries that have lower incomes than in the United States. And even though we think of ourselves as a mobile society compared with Europe, recent research indicates that the United States has less class mobility than previously believed, and less than in European countries. It is also the case that class mobility has not increased over the last few decades.

Economic Policy Institute

Income has already been redistributed dramatically, so that squawking about Liberals wanting to redistribute wealth rings pretty hollow.The United States has, on average, enjoyed broader prosperity under Democrats than Republicans. Time to put things back the way they were and promote the general prosperity for a change. The elites have had their fling with power, time to give 'em the boot.

Thanks for the reminder of why we have a democracy in the first place. We seem to need it periodically.