In their new book, “Winner-Take-All Politics,” professors Jacob S. Hacker, Yale University, and Paul Pierson, University of California Berkeley, chronicle a systematic redistribution of wealth in the United States over the last 30 years that has greatly widened the gap between the rich and the rest. Subtitled “How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class,” the book starts off with statistics about the growing economic divide. For example, from 1979 to shortly before the Great Recession, the top 1% of earners received 36% of all gains in household income, and between 2001 and 2006, the gap grew even wider, with the top 1% garnering 53% of all household income growth.
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