Another name for the Gilded Era everyone in this article is so proud of is the 'Robber Baron Era'–and with good reason. Robber Barons may have helped usher in the American industrial age, but it was purchased at the price of unfair business practices, crushing monopolies, utter disdain for workers, starvation wages, filthy and mean living conditions, twelve-hour days, young children chained to their machines, and bloody labor riots broken by the Robber Barons’ private army, Pinkerton. If the size of the national deficit and the growing inequity of income distribution are any indication, it’s time to forget the second Gilded Era and reinstate equitable taxation.

This article about wealth, and whether this new gilded age is good, was basically a platform speech for the wealthy, with some critique by the also wealthy. No real discussions of wealth or inequality. No justification or refutation. Important to read, but only because someone in the media needs to knock the blowhards and their supporters back with facts about the problems caused, in both the developed and third worlds, by such grotesque inequalities.

Decent piece of analytical reporting. Balanced by showing benefits of wealthy philanthropists as well as how naive many have become by noting previous periods of great economic expansion were more egalitarian, in part thanks to good gov't. Could have mentioned that the Carnegies and Rockefellers relied heavily on corporate welfare. Quotes Buffett's boast of how good the average $45,000 per capita income is when this is misleading as revenue is simply divided through the population. The more accurate number is median income, which is around $43,000 per entire household. A very different picture emerges from this as half the households struggle beneath it.