Thanks to Wikicommons.

You may not know this… but we at US Democrazy are doing pretty well for ourselves.

In a couple years we’ll have finished paying off the loan on our office/van. PLUS we have all of the potatoes we could ever want for dinner (as long as that number is one).

Apparently though there are some in America who are doing even better.  In fact, the wealthy are doing so well that Paul Krugman, after watching James Bond, remarked

(incomes) that were once viewed as impressive numbers, the kind of thing only arch-villains might demand, now look trivial. Or maybe the other way to look at it is that we have a lot more arch-villains around than we used to.

Is it true are the wealthy doing so well that they’ve become arch-villains in their own right?  Analyzing modern American income distributions in a NY Times Op-Ed Nicholas Kristof notes

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976.

and angrily states that

we’ve reached a banana republic point where our inequality has become both economically unhealthy and morally repugnant.

Some though are questioning whether inequality is actually an economic problem.  Over at Economix, Edward Glaeser comments that he doesn’t

like inequality any more than the next person, but that doesn’t mean that inequality is responsible for every bad thing that has happened to America.

Whether good or bad, income inequality is probably here to stay.  Tyler Cohen analyzing inequality and its causes notes that many “cultural critics” think Americans

should be less harried, more interested in nurturing friendships, and more interested in the non-commercial sphere of life.

…those same critics have basically been telling us, without realizing it, that we should be acting in such a manner as to increase measured income inequality. Not only is high inequality an inevitable concomitant of human diversity, but growing income inequality may be, too, if lots of us take the kind of advice that will make us happier.

Which got us wondering, do we really want more than our blog, our van, and our potatoes?  What are your thoughts on happiness, money, and the ultra rich?  Would this blog be any better if read on a solid gold computer?