I’m not arguing that there will NOT always be rich and poor, but more about where we set the baseline and threshold of the scale between wealth and poverty.

As a baseline I’d say no one should have to go to bed hungry and/or without a roof over their head, medical care, education, and employment.

As a threshold I’d say no one should be able to accumulate so much “dead” wealth what it doesn’t benefit anyone other than the person(s) holding it. That’s just sound business savvy.

“Excessive” wealth or what I call “dead” wealth needs to be put back into the system via a system of taxation that provides for the greater good of society; public works, healthcare, education, food and shelter, infrastructure.

That creates “growth” not stagnation.

The only thing holding us back are a small band of greedy self-centered individuals like the “85″ or the 1% who need to be held accountable by the society they derived their wealth from.

Here’s some numbers to look at that, if allowed to follow the same pattern spell nothing bu trouble for most of us.

PIKETTY’S INEQUALITY STORY IN SIX CHARTS

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the class-bound societies of Western Europe were dominated by a landed and monied elite that owned much of the land and the wealth. The United States had rich and poor, too, but the wealth was still spread around a bit more widely. In 1910, for example, the one per cent in Europe owned about sixty-five per cent of all wealth; in the United States, the figure was forty-five per cent.

In recent decades, the roles have been reversed. The U.S. monied elite has outstripped its counterpart on the other side of the Atlantic, and wealth has become even more concentrated in the United States than it is in Europe. In 2010, the American one per cent owned about a third of all the wealth: the European one per cent owned about a quarter. Citing figures like these, Piketty warns that “the New World may be on the verge of becoming the Old Europe of the twenty-first century’s globalized economy.”