Who's waging class warfare?

This is a question to which I find the answers to be very interesting.

This is a study conducted by Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely of Duke University.

They asked a cross-section of Americans the following question:

"What would you like the distribution of wealth to be in America?"

Here are the results of that question in a graph...

This group of Americans think the top 20% of earners should own 35% of the wealth of the country - a capitalist, yet still mostly egalitarian view of wealth distribution.

The study then asked this same group of Americans this second question:

"What do you think the actual distribution of wealth is in America?"

Here is the resulting answer in a graph...

Again, this group of Americans seems to realize that we are not an egalitarian society, and that free market capitalism does skew wealth toward the top. No value judgement, just a question of perception of reality.

Here is the actual distribution of wealth in the US.

As a member of the 10%, I consider myself fortunate, but also deeply disturbed - especially at a time with rising debt and the lowest taxes since 1950 - that the middle-class is at a tipping point. And if the middle-class falls into ruin, so follows the country. We simply cannot sustain our economy selling only to the top 20%. Something to ponder the next time we hear from Republican lawmakers and pundits that the Democrats are fomenting class warfare against the rich. As Warren Buffet once said, 

"The only class warfare going on in the US is the rich-class waging war against everyone else, and the rich are winning."

Indeed.