[P]ublic opinion regarding the Bush tax cuts was remarkably shallow and confused, considering the multitrillion- dollar stakes. More than three years after the 2001 tax cut took effect, 40% of the public said they had not thought about whether they favored or opposed it, and those who did take a position did so largely on the basis of how they felt about their own tax burden. Views about the tax burden of the rich had no apparent impact on public opinion, despite the fact that most of the benefits went to the top 5% of taxpayers; egalitarian values reduced support for the tax cut, but only among strong egalitarians who were also politically well informed.

A well-fed (and math-phobic) media elite doesn't like elevating the raw numbers here into salience--as Bartels notes,

[A] social gulf has been exacerbated by the economic trends of the New Gilded Age. . . [It] constitutes a significant obstacle to political progress in responding to those trends. One can only wonder how many affluent readers [and owners of an ever-more concentrated media] will get around to pondering “The Inequality Conundrum” as soon as they return from the Cayman Islands.

There are also some choice refutations of bien-pensant complacency about inequality throughout Bartels's first chapter:

Many ordinary Americans believe that “large differences in income are necessary for America’s prosperity,” as one standard survey question puts it. However, economists who have studied the relationship between in equality and economic growth have found little evidence that large disparities in income and wealth promote growth. There is not even much hard evidence in support of the commonsense notion that progressive tax rates retard growth by discouraging economic effort. Indeed, one liberal economist, Robert Frank, has written that “the lessons of experience are downright brutal” to the notion that higher taxes would stifle economic growth by causing wealthy people to work less or take fewer risks.

Much of the economic argument for in equality hinges on the assumption that large fortunes will be invested in productive economic activities. In fact, however, there is some reason to worry that the new hyper-rich are less likely to invest their wealth than to fritter it away on jewelry, yachts, and caviar. According to one press report, the after-tax savings rate of house holds in the top 5% of the income distribution fell by more than half from 1990 through 2006 (from 13.6% to 6.2%), while real sales growth in the luxury retail industry averaged more than 10% per year.

Well, the huge appetite of ultra-wealthy investors for subprime paper in the early 2000s did some good, right? Expanding opportunities for homeownership via option ARMs, "pick-a-pay," and NINJA loans? Oh, wait. . . .

There's only so much words can say. Bartels's charts really paint the picture of inequality starkly. Here are trends in family incomes overall:

And here are how things look among that top 1% that was doing so well in the graph above:

In other words, we live in a world of fractal inequality, where chasms of income open up even within already elite circles. Bartels shows the mutually reinforcing relationship between a winner-take-all economy and a polity where "elected officials are utterly unresponsive to the policy preferences of millions of low-income citizens, leaving their political interests to be served or ignored as the ideological whims of incumbent elites may dictate." His perceptive scholarship is a reality check for a media entranced by the petty personality disputes of the long campaign.