So James over at US News tries to sell that the rich are taking it on the chin:

Despite Rangel's comment on tax "equity," the numbers show that the top 1 percent of income earners took home a smaller share of income and paid a higher percentage in taxes in 2004 than they did back in 2000. In 2000, the top 1 percent took home 17.8 percent of income and paid 36.5 percent of taxes. In 2004, they took home 16.3 percent of income and paid 36.7 percent in taxes. And according to the Tax Foundation, the number of taxpayers who either had no income tax liability–or had none after taking advantage of the code's many credits and deductions–has surged since 2000 from 30 million to 42 million in 2004.

How... interesting. Then there's these numbers ( the chart is from this article)....

From 2003 to 2004, the average incomes of the bottom 99 percent of households grew by less than 3 percent, after adjusting for inflation. In contrast, the average incomes of the top one percent of households experienced a jump of more than 18 percent, after adjusting for inflation. (Census data show that real median income fell between 2003 and 2004. Average income is pulled up by gains at the top of the income spectrum; much of the 2.3 percent rise among the bottom 99 percent seems to largely reflects gains by households in the top decile of the income spectrum. In contrast, trends in median income capture the experience of households in the middle of the income spectrum.)

The top one percent of households (those with annual incomes above about $315,000 in 2004) garnered 53 percent of the income gains in 2004....

...The share of total U.S. income that the top one percent of households received in 2004 was greater than the share it received in any prior year since 1929, except for 1999 and 2000.

So what what James did was take the one of the only two years in the last 87 years that the top 1% have received more income than in 2004 and use it as his baseline. Now, since James has clearly forgotten what happened in 2000, let's remember - it was the end of the largest bull stock market since... 1929. The rich did quite well, thanks, that year, and guess what - unearned income (that's stock gains) is taxed less than earned income - which is why they paid less taxes because so much of their income, that year, was based on capital gains income.

It isn't that Rangel doesn't know what he's talking about, it's that James is cherrypicking his data to make it look as unfavorable to the rich as possible.

And, as I'm sure readers have noticed from looking at that chart, all these technical details are really besides the point anyway - no matter how you slice it, the rich are clearly getting richer, and everyone else is clearly losing income share, and have been doing so since about the mid late 70's. Which, not coincidentally, is about when hourly wages for non-supervisory workers also peaked. Slice it, dice it, puree it, it all works out to a country where the middle and working classes are falling behind, while the rich, and their paid lackeys, feast like pigs at a trough. The bonusses for Wall Street last year were equal to the raises received by 80 million Americans.

James is part of the strong work going on to understate the extent of income inequality (let alone wealth inequality) in the United States. As with global warming, there are a lot of people who are doing just fine out of the current system, and the steps necessary to deal with inequality, such as the sort of strong progressive taxation James is effectively arguing against, would cost them a lot of money. So, as with large polluters with their externalities, who don't want to pay to clean up the mess they've made, the plan is to keep income inequality in the "does it really exist and if it does is it really so bad?" stage for as long as possible. Every year something isn't done about it, after all, is worth billions.