>>I think Jim understood your point. He just disagrees with it, and I am with him on this one. Executive salaries, bonuses, and stock options HAVE become obscene. Gretchen Mortensen of the NY Times won a Pulitzer Prize last year on this very subject, and continues to shine a big probing flashlight on those who deserve it. You're right about Darwinism; it has always been so and always will be. But never has the gap between rich and poor been wider in this country. You can look at someone like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs and say OK, he's rich, but the employees and stockholders have benefited. Where it becomes obscene is when top execs of money-losing or even failed companies walk away with millions of bananas. That's not right. And we need to fix it.
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>The rich get richer and the poor are doing better. I went with my Sunday School class a few months ago to feed some homeless people downtown and when we pulled up they were all milling around waiting for us to unload the food. Our class leader gave a talk before we fed, but he had to get everyone together and get their attention before we could get started. That meant the three people who were talking on cell phones had to finish their conversations. There seems to be some incongruity between homelessness and cellphone usage here. The point is, the poor in America are rich by comparison. Capitalism is the best system on the planet.

Not only are the poor not getting better off, the middle class isn't, either, when you take inflation and the cost of health insurance into account. During a time when the rich have enjoyed unprecedented economic gains, the middle class is actually worse off in adjusted dollars than it was 20 years ago. And that doesn't even consider the loss of short term peace of mind (job security) and long term peace of mind (the virtual disappearance of retirement pensions). In the latter case, risk has been shifted from corporations to individuals and the government. This has been a massive redistribution of wealth to the most well off from all the rest of us. Robin Hood in reverse, you might call it.