Wealthy 1 % earnings climb, while Middle Class declines.

The frustrating thing about listening to whiny conservative voters who are angry over lousy wages, higher bills and job insecurity, is that they're only making things worse for themselves. That in turn makes them even more angry and self destructive...you get the picture. So things never will get better. Oddly, all this does is make the Republican Party stronger.

So far so good. The great news for Republicans is that they've taken our economy back to the early 1900's. Who knows how long it'll be before we're ushering in the age of the 21st century Robber Barons.  

According to the latest research, we won't have long to wait:

NY Times: Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, a wide gap between the top 1 percent, whose earnings rose by 11.2 percent, and the other 99 percent, whose earnings declined by 0.4 percent. Excluding earnings from investment gains, the top 10 percent of earners took 46.5 percent of all income in 2011, the highest proportion since 1917.

After accounting for inflation, median family income has declined over the last two years. In 2011, it stagnated for the poorest and dropped for those in the middle of the income distribution … Median household income is about 9 percent lower than it was in 1999, after accounting for inflation.

The disparity: The wealthy have benefited from a four-year boom in the stock market, while high rates of unemployment have continued to hold down the income of wage earners.

Republicans often point to another way of looking at wealth, where the poor take full advantage of all the social safety net programs. They gleefully proclaim that poverty never looked so good. 

At the same time ironically, they’re trying to get rid of our social safety nets, negating any point they were making.  

Research led by the Cornell economist Richard V. Burkhauser, said his numbers measured “how are the resources that person has to live on changing over time” … whereas Saez’s numbers measure “how are different people being rewarded in the marketplace.

The steady decline of middle class wages tells us we've been fighting the wrong battle.

Notably, many of the Obama administration’s progressive policies have been aimed at blunting the effects of income inequality, rather than tackling income inequality itself.