Robert Reich's Opinion

Robert Reich: The argument is that inequality is bad for everyone, not just the middle class and poor. The rich would do better with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy then they're doing now with a large share of an economy that is barely growing at all. It's not growing because there's not enough purchasing power in the middle class, and the lower-middle class and everybody aspiring to join the middle class, to keep the economy going.

We've seen this from the pioneering work of Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, looking back at tax records. They've brought that research up to 2012 and they see that 95 percent of the gains, the economic gains, since the recovery began in 2009, are going to the top 1 percent. Meanwhile, median household income keeps dropping, adjusted for inflation. Well, where are people going to get the money they need to keep the economy going? We can't go back into debt like we were in before 2008. So there's a fundamental threat to the economy.

There's also a very fundamental threat to the democracy we live in because, as even Louis Brandeis, the great jurist, understood in the late 19th century, when we last had this extraordinary gap, "We can either live in a democracy," he said, "or we can have a huge amount of wealth concentrated in few hands, but we can't have both."