Book TV presents Barry Siegel, Tom Hamburger, Peter Wallsten, Chris Hedges and Matt Miller discussing The Future of American Politics at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the UCLA Campus.
I was especially interested by Matt Miller's comments on the new inequality factor. He summarized it well in his statement that "the levels of CEO pay in this country are reaching levels that are so divorced from performance and so divorced from any common sense/sense of reality...The gap between what happens in a very small strata at the top and the vast swath of Americans...raises questions about the coherence of a democracy when you've got a very thin layer constantly doing better and more and more people feeling stressed." While there will always be some level of inequality in capitalist societies, the disparity between rich and poor in the United States has reached unprecedented levels in the past few years.