Originally Posted by Sum Ting Wong

Wealth to purchase a Cessna is not income.
If you've got food, shelter, iPhones and plasma TVs, does it matter if your neighbor has a Cessna?
In a free system when your neighbor succeeds (maybe buys a Cessna), you are free to emulate the things that worked for him.

You forgot to add that the government programs that were sold to the American people as a "War on Poverty" have now created generations of people who not only do not work, but don't know anyone who has ever worked. They have created a culture where getting up in the morning and going to work to earn your money to pay for a home and food and the necessities of life - as well as the luxuries - is completely foreign. When it all started welfare paid for basic necessities. Now that it has gone on for 50 years, what used to be "basic necessities" is now paying for luxuries that many middle class people either can't afford or choose not to spend money on, like smartphones. The poor in Africa are literally starving. The "poor" here have an obesity epidemic. Every year the government adjusts the "poverty line" - a completely arbitrary number - upward so they can designate more and more people as "poor" and pretend that taking more and more money from the rest of us is the solution. The poor in this country live better than many in the middle class in Europe, if you consider their cars, the square footage of their apartments, their TV sets, etc.

The whole concept of "income inequality" implies that there should be some sort of "income EQUALITY." This is a completely false premise. Even in a Communist state, there is no "income equality." The rich keep theirs and take more from the rest, who all live in squalor.