"As the gap between rich and poor has widened since 1970, the odds that a child born in poverty will climb to wealth or that a rich child will fall into the middle class remains stuck despite the widespread belief that the United States remains a more mobile society than Europe, economists and sociologists say that in recent decades, the typical child starting out in poverty in continental Europe or in Canada has had a better chance at prosperity."

Bill Moyers gives an excellent commentary on the death of the American dream. As I look through the world I no longer have the stomach for rose colors. The reality of the world is beginning to hammer through even my most treasured illusions. Welcome to room 101.

You know the story. For now, a relatively small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income, as large economic and financial institutions obtain unprecedented power over our daily lives. In 1960, in terms of wealth -- the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was 30-fold. Four decades later, it is more than 75-fold. Now such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if everyone were benefiting proportionately. But that's not the case and statistics tell the story. I know statistics can cause the eyes to glaze over, but as one of my mentors once reminded me, it is the mark of a truly educated man or woman to be deeply moved by statistics. Now, this is an educated audience with a few exceptions and I want to see if these statistics move you. While we've witnessed several periods of immense growth in recent decades, the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers -- that's a mass of people -- fell by 7 percent between 1973 and 2000. During 2004 and the first couple of months of this year, wages failed to keep pace with inflation for the first time since the 1990 recession. They were up somewhat in April, but it still means that working Americans effectively took an across the board pay cut at a time when the economy grew by a healthy 4 percent and corporate profits hit record high, as companies got more productivity out of workers while keeping pay raises down. Believe it or not, the United States now ranks the highest among the highly developed countries in each of the seven measures of inequality tracked by the index. While we enjoy the second-highest GDP in the world, excluding tiny Luxembourg, we rank dead-last among the 20 most-developed countries in fighting poverty, and we're off the chart in terms of the number of Americans living on half the median income or less. full