Normally, it’s only fringe publications like Mother Jones or The Nation that find it important to discuss the gap betweeen rich and poor in America. But The Economist, in a typically fact-laden fashion, tackled the question in a September 2003 article entitled “Would You Like Your Class War Shaken or Stirred, Sir?”:

Follow almost any Democratic presidential candidate around, and it won't be long before you hear this statistic. In 1980, the average CEO was paid around 40 times as much as the average worker; now the multiple is above 400. George Bush's tax cuts “for the rich”, say the likes of John Kerry, who formally announced his candidacy this week, must be scrapped to help those of lesser means. Meanwhile, pundits, notably Paul Krugman at the New York Times, have argued that a new “plutocracy” is rising.

By whatever measure you use, the richest Americans have done very well over the past few decades. According to the Census Bureau, the share of national income going to those in the top fifth of earners rose from 44% in 1973 to 50% in 2000. The share going to the top 1% rose to 15% in 1998, higher than it has ever been since the second world war, according to a recent study of tax returns by two economists, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.

Take wealth rather than income, and America's disparity is even more startling. The wealthiest 1% of all households controls 38% of national wealth, while the bottom 80% of households holds only 17%, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Around 85% of stockmarket wealth is held by a lucky 20%.

If the rich have been doing much better than other Americans in relative terms, the poor have failed to improve their lot as they did in the 1950s and 1960s. The wage incomes of the bottom 20% of households have barely grown in real terms since the mid-1970s. As for wealth, the bottom fifth has debts that exceed its assets, making its wealth a negative number. The bottom fifth's percentage of national wealth worsened from -0.3% in 1983 to -0.6% in 1998.

Admittedly, none of the above has much to do with Bush in particular, but it does lead to questions about a larger issue. With the Democratic party having to lean more and more to the center in order to gather a coalition necessary to compete with the Republicans and their faith-based economics, our range of options shrinks when choosing who to represent us in the government. When your only two choices are middle-right and “right-wing nutjob” right, you begin to suspect that some viable policy options are perhaps being left in a dark unswept corner somewhere with most of the country’s poorer and/or more darkly-complected folks. I certainly shouldn’t be criticizing Kerry when, despite my ambivalence or worse about him, he’s our best hope for returning this country to any level of decency and reasonability. Nonetheless, the Economist article ends by making a point that the muckrakers on the left have been shouting about in their free speech zones for years now.

. . . The tax policies of the Bush administration will probably only exacerbate the already wide gap between rich and poor. The inheritance tax has been all but scrapped. Marginal rates on top incomes have come down. Most important may be this year's reduction in capital gains and dividends taxes which, by some estimates, will provide a windfall to just the top 20% of households.

It is these “giveaways” that the Democrats are now concentrating on. But raising marginal tax rates, the Democrats' traditional solution to inequality, usually hits many people who regard themselves as middle-class, and does nothing to reduce the vast fortune of true plutocratic families, such as, well, Mr Kerry's.

Indeed, is the Harvard-educated Mr Kerry, who is married to a Heinz heiress worth $600m, any more an homme du peuple than George II, as some Democrats like to call Mr Bush? Howard Dean, the Democratic front-runner, may stress his occupation as a humble doctor, but he grew up in the Hamptons and Mr Bush's grandmother was a bridesmaid to his granny. As long as the presidency remains the shuttlecock of different scions of the north-eastern aristocracy, Americans may have a hard time thinking of any party as the champions of the poor.