The Bloated Overclass.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side - Viewpoint essay

Twenty years ago, it was risky to point out the growing inequality in America. I did it in a New York Times essay and was quickly denounced, in The Washington Times , as a "Marxist." If only. I've never been able to get through more than a couple of pages of Das Kapital , even in English, and the Grundrisse functions like Rozerem.

But it no longer takes a Marxist, real or alleged, to see that America is being polarized between the super-rich and the sub-rich everyone else. In the June 10 New York Times Magazine , we learn that Larry Summers, the centrist Democratic economist and former Harvard president, is now obsessed with the statistic that, since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. At the same time, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points. Summers now admits that his former cheerleading for the corporate-dominated global economy feels like "pretty thin gruel."

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But those who have long refused to think about class polarization have a fallback position, sketched out by Roger Lowenstein in an essay in the same issue of The New York Times Magazine that features Larry Summers's sobered mood. Briefly put: As long as the middle class is still trudging along and the poor are not starving flamboyantly in the streets, what does it matter if the super-rich are absorbing an ever larger share of the national income?

"Whether Roger Clemens, who will get something like $10,000 for every pitch he throws, earns 100 times or 200 times what I earn is kind of irrelevant," Lowenstein writes. "My kids still have health care, and they go to decent schools. It's not the rich people who are pulling away at the top who are the problem."

Well, there is a problem with the super-rich, several of them in fact. A bloated overclass can drag down a society as surely as a swelling underclass.

First, the Clemens example distracts from the reality that a great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor. Take Wal-Mart, our largest...