If this land is your land, how could it be mine...

When I was a kid my friends sang a take off on This Land Is Your Land..our variation was "this land is your land, this land is my land. If this land is your land how could it be my land? So you better get off or I'll knock your head off. This land was made for me not you". How prophetic and how profound we were without even knowing it.
Over the past few years,whenever I heard a discussion about income distribution it was also noted that the richest 1% of the population has more wealth than the bottom 90% combined. This has not changed if fact it has gotten worse. The bottom is falling out of the bottom. Many pension plans have literally been depleted by the behavior of a greedy few. Previously middle class families are falling into a catagory called "the new poor". This did not happen over night and has been part of a cultural and political war in which corporate taxes, have gotten lower and lower,where tax rates on the top income earners has dropped from a level of 80% in1950 to less than 40% due to the Bush tax cuts which benefited again,disproportionately the top 1% of the country. Lets add on tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and hidden Swiss Bank accounts which until fairly recently the govenment has been pretty passive about pursuing and we see even more and more how the top income 1% of the population.
Estate taxes have dropped since 2002 from 50% with an exemption of $1 million to 45% in 2009 with an exemption of $3.5 million per person. The estate tax,due to congressional inaction will be dropped for the coming year and will be restored at the old 2002 rate. Another part of the inequity is that of Capital Gains taxes (taxes on investment income) now about 15% for most and lower for others. These rates are lower than labor generated income and are thus unfair and contribute to the disparity of the top per cent of the population and the rest of us. This creates more of sense of the disparity in our culture where the US is clearly more of an oligarchy than a democracy.
I will discuss in more detail the consequences of this pattern. For now I will point out just one. As a result of a budget shortfall in the MTA in NYC, students will not be getting metro-cards to go to school. Once again this creates a hardship on the poorest of us. This is not a democracy.