Inequality for most

The signs of economic recovery are all around us, including in San Joaquin County where the Great Recession took a huge toll in jobs and property values. Foreclosures are well off their Great Recession peak; unemployment remains high but not at the Depression-era level it reached in some areas; cars are selling, restaurants have customers and mall parking lots are full. All is well, or so it would seem.
But a troubling report from the Economic Policy Institute (http://www.epi.org/publication/unequal-states/) shines a disturbing light on what more and more is capturing the attention of economists, policy makers and the media: income inequality.
Of course, a certain political cohort dismisses talk about the growing distance between the haves and have-nots. Those who raise the specter of income inequality are simply engaging in class warfare, they argue. Keep it up, these apologists contend, and we'll kill the goose that lays the golden egg. By goose they mean the much vaulted "job creators" and by golden egg they mean higher incomes for all.
Except that the EPI study by economists Estella Sommeiller and Mark Price suggests all are not sharing in those higher incomes. Not by a long shot.
In California, between 1997 and 2007, average incomes grew by 31.5 percent, but drill down on that number as Sommeiller and Price did and you find that the top 1 percent of income earners captured 62.4 percent of that total income growth. In that same period, incomes for the top 1 percent increased by nearly 192 percent. For everyone else in California the increase was just over 13 percent.
Who are the 1 percenters? In California they have an average income of more than $1.2 million per year, nearly 27 times greater than the average income of the bottom 99 percent ($45,589).
Income disparity in this state now pushes toward highs not seen since the Depression (Not the Great Recession. The Depression).
And it's not just in California. The pattern Sommeiller and Price found here is repeated across the nation.
Pooh-poohing this reality, dismissing it as class warfare promoted for political purposes, is to ignore what's happening -- and what's happening is the middle class is shrinking. Seventy percent of the nation's economy is driven by consumer spending. If there are fewer consumers to spend,  economic vitality becomes increasingly anemic.
Only a radical few suggest massive income redistribution. But only the myopic can't see the danger of letting this divide increase.