The nation’s growing income inequality recently has generated considerable attention—and has sparked a backlash by billionaires. TED’s Chris Anderson showed what a hot button issue it is when he tried to repress a video talk on the subject by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer. Hanauer, like billionaire investor Warren Buffett, supports increasing taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals for the good of the nation. Buffett and other billionaires have joined forces in a new pro-tax-increase-for-the-rich organization to assert: “We are the 1 percent, we stand with the 99 percent.”

Now the issue has hit the presidential campaign trail. In a new book, “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve  Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong,” Edward Conard argues that the “enormous and growing income inequality in the United States is not a sign that the system is rigged.” Rather, it is a sign that our economy is working.

Conard is the friend and former colleague of Mitt Romney at the private equity firm Bain Capital. As the New York Times put it in a profile of Conard:

Conard hopes that the arguments detailed in his book will help readers understand why it’s so crucial that his former boss—who believes the government should help the investor class—win this November.

The investor class already is on a winning streak. In 1976, the top 1 percent of households received 8.9 percent of all pre-tax income—and by 2008, the top 1 percent share had more than doubled to 21.0 percent. Between 1979 and 2007, the last year before the recession, median family income rose by 35 percent, while incomes for those at the 99th percentile rose by 278 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). “The levels of inequality and the financial stress on the middle class have risen dramatically,” according to EPI.

Over the past several decades, the United States has undergone a remarkable transformation, with income growth stalling for the middle class while the incomes of those at the top continued to rise dramatically compared to the rest of the working population.

But strengthening the middle class is not on Romney’s agenda. Just as David Stockman, former budget director under President Ronald Reagan, said:

I don't think that Mitt Romney can legitimately say that he learned anything about how to create jobs in the LBO [leveraged buyout] business. The LBO business is about how to strip cash out of old, long-in-the-tooth companies and how to make short-term profits....
Conard and Romney certainly share views on numerous policy matters. Like many Republicans, they promote lower taxes and less regulation for those who achieve financial success. Romney has also said that rising inequality is not a problem and that the attention paid to the issue is “about envy. I think it’s about class warfare.”

Cutting taxes for the rich is a key Romney platform. But as Hanauer put it in his TED talk:

If it’s true tax cuts created jobs, we’d be drowning in jobs.

Maybe the pool is full for Mitt Romney & Co., but the rest of the nation is parched.