America's basic promise—an ever-rising, ever-widening prosperity—is broken. Between the end of World War II and the late 1970s, incomes in the United States were becoming more equal. In other words, incomes at the bottom were rising faster than those at the top. Since the late 1970s, this trend has reversed.

Data from tax returns show that the top 1 percent of households received 8.9 percent of all pre-tax income in 1976. But by 2008, the share of income going to the top 1 percent had more than doubled to 21.0 percent. Meanwhile, the gap between CEO pay and everyone else’s wages has also skyrocketed. In 1980, CEO pay equaled 42 times the average blue-collar worker’s pay. In 2010, CEOs made a stunning 343 times a worker’s average pay.