Clinging onto your middle-class status by your fingernails? The debt-deal won't be helping you.

"While the income share of the nation's top 1% is hovering around 20% --- near what it was in the Gilded Age and up from about 8% in the 1970s --- the rest of us haven't gotten a raise in nearly four decades."
--- Rana Foroohar, TIME Magazine, August 15, 2011, at page 26

"It is hard to shrink the size of government right now without exacerbating inequality."

--- Ken Rogoff (Harvard economist), co-author, THIS TIME IT'S DIfferent
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"High levels of inequality depress longer-term growth by depressing more broad-based consumption. You end up with a lot going on at Walmart and Nordstrom without enough going on in the middle."
--- Jared Bernstein, Senior Fellow, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
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