“Spreading the wealth”, what a horrible notion. Surely all the good Joes will recoil. Or perhaps they would have before the current financial crisis brought home the fact that the upper strata have been looting the country of wealth for decades, while the income of normal people has remainded flat. Maybe they will realize that their interests differ significantly from hackish pseuds in bowties.
If this country had any true political spirit left, they’d be hanging the Wall Street types from the lampposts. Probably that’s not going to happen, but it does look like they’re going to elect a funny-looking politician with an exotic background who promises mildly more progressive tax rates.

Here’s some interesting data about US wealth distribution. For one thing, it’s drastically less egalitarian than any other developed country. Here’s another cute visualization of where ordinary people stand in relation to great wealth. Here’s another graph showing how income inequality has been increasing with time.

Here’s a simple truth: wealth gets spread around all the time. How it’s spread is a product of economic realities and government policy. Our past policies have distributed it upward; spreading some of it downward is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. In fact, it’s the economically wise thing to do; if we continue down the path of impoverishing the middle and working classes, the eventual result will be converting the US economy to that of a third-world kleptocracy. Our education and health outcomes are already alarmingly down that path.

Meanwhile, Obama has been endorsed by Nature, and here’s a physicist registering his opinion:

Obama is very far away from being an infallible political savior, and if he wins I’m sure there will be times when he does the wrong thing. But… he thinks like an academic in the best sense of the word. He listens, and considers what he hears critically and analytically, and then comes to a conclusion and deals with the consequences. Even if I don’t always agree with the conclusions, it will be an unambiguous blessing to at long last have a President with that cast of mind.

I mention this because it’s clear that anybody who puts any value at all on the intellect has to come down in the Obama camp. McCain knows nothing and cares nothing for the realities of the world, and Palin is worse. We’ve had eight years of Republican postmodernism; it’s time to put the reality-based community back in charge.