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Kevin Drum, over at Mother Jones, has a striking chart of the lag in median wages since the expansion of GDP began in 2002 (not including the recent recessionary shrinkage):

For three decades we've artificially kept middle class wage increases far below the growth rate of the economy, and this trend has been even more pronounced over the past eight years. This has created an enormous pool of extra money that's been -- yes -- strip mined and redirected to the rich, and fixing this is Barack Obama's biggest and longest-term challenge. If we restore the normal growth of middle class wages, it provides a sustainable consumer base for the entire economy; it reduces the demand for endless credit card debt; it brings down income inequality naturally; and it goes a long way toward keeping the financial sector under control and reining in Wall Street salaries without putting in place a bunch of artificial (and probably fruitless) regulations.

He's really nailed the core problem with what's been going on in this country, and it's inception most likely dates back to 1980 and the Reagan revolution. This study, at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, shows that, indeed, the concentration of wealth in the top 1% hasn't been this extreme since 1929:

The jump in income concentration in 2005 brought the percentage of income going to the top 1 percent of households to its highest level since 1929. The top 1 percent of households (those with annual incomes above about $350,000 in 2005) garnered 47 percent -- nearly half -- of the total income gains in 2005. More than two thirds of total income gains accrued to those in the top decile (the highest-income 10 percent) of the income scale. Less than one third of total income gains went to the bottom 90 percent of households.

If the recession turns particularly nasty, we just might get that revolution everyone's been talking about, where Harlem invades The Upper East Side, for instance:

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