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That's why it's troubling that the GINI coefficient in the US is large and growing.
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Referenced as a link
above, but emphasized here to specifically address the misplaced concern.
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Why Income Distribution Doesn't Matter in This Country
The NY Times has somehow decided that one of America's real problems is widening income distribution, or more specifically, the exponentially increasing wealth of the top tenth of one percent of US earners. The series seems to be running to about 47 episodes (actually 10), but a key article is here, entitled “Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind,” There are a number of ways to attack this article. One is to fisk their really abused and misused numbers, which George Reisman does here on the Mises Economics Blog.
Lets accept that the very very rich are getting richer. So lets move from there to the question of...
"so what?"
The Times is a little weak on the "so what". I presume that in their intellectual-statist readership, it is an axiom that rich people suck and rich people getting richer sucks more. However, it is possible to pull out four things the Times extended editorial-masquerading-as-a-news-story finds bad about increasing income inequality:
- As the rich get richer, there is less money left for the rest of us
- The process of the rich getting richer reduces opportunities for the rest of us
- Having very rich people around make the rest of us feel bad
- The rich are only getting richer because the rest of us are subsidizing them through tax policy...
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Read the whole thing to see how the analysis debunks each myth.