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the ways. In the first round of Bush tax cuts, 40 percent of the cut went to the richest 1 percent of the population, those making over $373,000 a year. Since B makes quite a bit more than that $373K, he got way more than the average cut for that group, which was $53,123. With the second Bush tax cut, which was passed by Congress in 2003, B will get a break of $92,000, and that’s on income alone. The average working family will get $256, and almost half of all taxpayers will get a cut of less than $100. It’s not going to turn their lives around. B does not need the $92K. Let’s assume B has two units invested prudently and is earning 4 percent. If Bush ever gets the divided tax completely repealed (and these guys always get their whole loaf half at a time), B will get an additional $3,441,729 to spend annually. Good news for B: how much will you get out of it?

According to White House numbers, the second round of tax cuts would leave us with greatly increased deficits indefinitely. Bush said during his 2003 State of the Union address, “We will not deny, we will not ignore, we will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents and other generations.”

Let’s do a little exercise. Polls show that 90 percent of all Americans consider themselves middle-class. About 70 percent of Americans make less than $50,000 a year. In 2001, 1.3 million more Americans slipped below the federal poverty line, set at $18,100 a year for a family of four. That’s 33 million Americans at risk of hunger, including 13 million children. Nearly 8.5 million people, including 2.9 million children, live in homes where they have to skip meals or have too little to eat, sometimes going a whole day without food. Those 33 million people are 11.7 percent of the population, up for the first time since 1993. Median income in this country is $44,000 a year for a family of four. Median means half the people in this country live on less than that, many of them on a whole hell of a lot less.

The median is a much more meaningful number than “average” when it comes to discussing income, because the rich in this country are so much richer than the rest of us. As The New Yorker put it, if Bill Gates walks into a soup kitchen where two nuns are feeding thirty-eight homeless people, the average income of the people in that room is $1 billion per person. But it’s still thirty-eight penniless people, two nuns, and Bill Gates. Of course, half of us make more than the median, but what’s amazing is how many of us make just a little more and how few make so much more.

This means the quintiles—the population divided by the bottom 20 percent, next 20 percent, etc.—flatten out pretty fast. If you could see a drawing of the way income is split up among the population of this country, it’s like a profile of a chimney half-built into a wall, like a New Mexican kiva. There’s a sort of bulb at the base, which juts out a little bit more at the top than at the bottom (because more of us are middle class than are poor), and then suddenly the thing starts to stretch up, and up and up and up. That’s your top 5 percent, your top 1 percent, so far above where most Americans are that you can barely see them. If it were really a chimney, the stack would go up past the rooftop to about twenty-five stories, getting thinner all the way.

But there at the very tippy top, among a tiny fraction of the people, is where most of the country’s money is concentrated. The top 1 percent has almost twenty-five times as much as does everybody in the bottom fifth. This is not a normal condition in America, although as Kevin Phillips points out, there have been three periods of extreme division by income—the Gilded Age, the 1920s, and now. By the beginning of the new century, the gap between the rich and everyone else had escalated to levels not seen since the twenties. The rich got a lot richer and the poor got poorer—and so did everybody in the middle.

The middle-class “average” American has been slipping behind financially since 1973. The most reliable numbers one can use to measure