...The problem is that the same trends that have exacerbated inequality since 1980—unemployment, juggling multiple jobs and so on—have also made it increasingly difficult for less wealthy Americans to invest the time and other resources needed to sustain a strong marital bond.'

...the rich have consistently voted more often than the poor for the past four decades, and that voters are substantially more conservative in their economic views than nonvoters. They find that women are now more likely to vote than men, that the gap in voting rates between blacks and whites has largely disappeared, and that older Americans continue to vote more than younger Americans.

...Starting this year, a healthcare surtax of 3.8 percent is applied to capital gains and dividend income of individuals earning more than $200,000 and a nine-tenths of 1 percent healthcare tax to wages over $200,000 or couples over $250,000. Together, the two taxes will raise an estimated $317.7 billion over 10 years...the justification is plain: We are becoming a vastly unequal society in which most of the economic gains are going to the top. It’s only just that those with higher incomes bear some responsibility for maintaining the health of Americans who are less fortunate...This is a profoundly moral argument about who we are and what we owe each other as Americans. But Democrats have failed to make it...

“To be light is to be rich...dark skin comes from working in the sun…yearning to be light is a desire to look like rich Asians, not like Whites”

boom-bust-flip phenom is just one of the...ways that...suggests the financial crisis has benefited upper class while brutalizing the middle class.

Rich investors say that it takes at least $5 million to feel wealthy, according to a new investor sentiment report from UBS. Meanwhile, two-thirds of millionaires don’t consider themselves to be wealthy. They also define being wealthy not as having a certain amount of money, but having “no financial constraints on what they do.”

"People say I'm a dictator...I don't appreciate that, but if I'm going to be one, I'm going to be benevolent."

Incredibly, the [Pew Research] poll now even shows Obama with a stronger approval rating among affluent whites than downscale whites—something that’s never happened for a Democrat in a presidential election.

The East Village and the broader Lower East Side make up one of the most economically integrated parts of the city. It is one of the last places where the fairly rich and the very poor live on the same blocks and shop in the same bodegas. But the area is steadily becoming more like most of Manhattan: dominated by those with high incomes paying seemingly absurd rents, while the poor either leave or stay in government housing on the periphery...

Is George Zimmerman innocent of murdering Trayvon Martin? Of course not. But do not forget that justice has little to do with matters of the law. The...talking heads on TV, radio, and online, who are offering up commentary on the case, have for the most part, missed one essential and obvious fact about it. There is not one "justice" system in the United States...There are multiple ones which reflect a given person's race and class. Poor people do not get rich people's justice. Black and brown folks do not get white folks' justice. The data on incarceration rates and disparate sentencing offers overwhelming support for those claims.

“...Some of the traditional characteristics of middle classness are not seen as realistic. They have been replaced by an anxiety about the possibility of falling out of their economic class....” Even more arresting was the extent to which things that used to be the unquestioned trappings of middle-class life have come to be seen as upper-class luxuries...For the land of opportunity, this is a seismic shift.

...meaning that the U.S.’s famously abundant wealth does not equally benefit all children.