>>That was the norm in the US from the outset. Slavery exaggerated it for black people but white laborers were scarcely better off than slaves.
WWII and its aftermath created a huge demand for labor which changed things for a while, but the system eventually reverted to it norm.
Sadly, most working people drink the Fox News Kool Aid and perpetuate it.
Yep. Starting in the 1980s, wealth concentration began to work towards those intolerable levels experienced at the eve of the Revolution. There's a really annoying moving graphic here that nevertheless shows the trend since 1928:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/05/u-s-income-inequality-on-rise-for-decades-is-now-highest-since-1928/All we need now is for Paris Hilton or Honey Boo Boo to respond "let them eat cake" when told that the poor can't afford bread, and we can anticipate a spectacle. ;-)
"... They ne'er cared for us
yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses
crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to
support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act
established against the rich, and provide more
piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain
the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and
there's all the love they bear us."
-- Shakespeare: Coriolanus, Act 1, scene 1
