And the rich get richer.

According to the June 18 "Snapshot" by Lawrence Mischel, of the Economic Policy Institute, pay inequality in the U.S. continues to worsen. Huge gains at the top of the income scale have been fueled by, among other things, a surging inequality in wages. The ratio of the wage income of the top one percent of earners to that of the bottom 90 percent more than doubled between 1979 and 2006, increasing from a ratio of 9.4:1 to 19.9:1. In contrast there was relatively little change in the earnings disparity from 1947 to 1979, when wages at all levels of the economy grew apace.

When it comes to the wage income of the highest of the high earners, the gap has become a chasm. In 2004, the upper one-tenth of one percent earned 70.4 times as much as the average person in the bottom 90 percent of the income scale. Just 25 years earlier in 1979, the ratio was only 21:1. In 1979 it took the highest-paid earners 12.4 days to make what most other earners did in a year; by 2004 that was accomplished in 3.7 days.