She pointed to studies that showed 4 out of 10 children born into the lowest rung on the economic ladder remained there as adults.

The general presumption of most inequality researchers has been that earned income, usually salaries, is where all the action is, and that income from capital is neither important nor interesting. Piketty shows, however, that even today income from capital, not earnings, predominates at the top of the income distribution. He also shows that in the past--during Europe's Belle Époque and, to a lesser extent, America's Gilded Age--unequal ownership of assets, not unequal pay, was the prime driver of income disparities. And he argues that we're on our way back to that kind of society....

Capital still matters; at the very highest reaches of society, income from capital still exceeds income from wages, salaries, and bonuses. Piketty estimates that the increased inequality of capital income accounts for about a third of the overall rise in US inequality. But wage income at the top has also surged. Real wages for most US workers have increased little if at all since the early 1970s, but wages for the top one percent of earners have risen 165 percent, and wages for the top 0.1 percent have risen 362 percent. If Rastignac were alive today, Vautrin might concede that he could in fact do as well by becoming a hedge fund manager as he could by marrying wealth....

Who determines what a corporate CEO is worth? Well, there's normally a compensation committee, appointed by the CEO himself. In effect, Piketty argues, high-level executives set their own pay, constrained by social norms rather than any sort of market discipline.

NYRB

"The Big Lie"

Thus has Peter Wallison, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a former member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, almost single-handedly created the myth that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial crisis.

...

 In Wallison's article, he claimed that the charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission against six former Fannie and Freddie executives last week prove him right. This is another favorite tactic: He takes a victory lap whenever events cast Fannie and Freddie in a bad light. Rarely, however, has his intellectual dishonesty been on such vivid display. In fact, what the S.E.C.'s allegations show is that the Big Lie is, well, a lie.

Central to Wallison's argument is that the government's effort to encourage homeownership among low- and moderate-income Americans is what led to the crisis. Fannie and Freddie, which were required by law to meet certain "affordable housing mandates," were the primary instruments of that government policy; their need to meet those mandates, says Wallison, is what caused them to dive so heavily into those "risky" mortgages. And because they were powerful forces in the housing market, their entry into subprime dragged along the rest of the mortgage industry.

But the S.E.C. complaint makes almost no mention of affordable housing mandates. Instead, it charges that the executives were motivated to begin buying subprime mortgages -- belatedly, contrary to the Big Lie -- because they were trying to reclaim lost market share, and thus maximize their bonuses.

You know what's even funnier about Wallison?  Guess what he was saying less than a year before the meltdown.  He was he attacking Fannie and Freddie for not doing enough to promote borrowing by low-income home buyers:

    There are many lenders aggressively competing to make the higher-amount loans, and the GSEs are not doing the job they should for low-income homebuyers.

    Fannie and Freddie should do a much better job of providing affordable home financing to a neglected portion of the mortgage market.

1. raise the minimum wage
   
2. restore Glass-Segal so that investment banks and deposit banks cannot merge - this led to market manipulation in housing and energy markets that directly take money from the middle class and give it to the rich
   
3. raise interest rates on savings so middle class people are encouraged to save instead of give their money to investment banks and hope for the best.

So the plan to "fix" income inequality to to take money from people who earned it by knowledgeably investing in jobs and put it in the hands of politicians?

Has someone actually said that?

People are poor due to failed government programs and their own issues and decisions. Our welfare system is a poverty trap, try and work your way out and lose benefits faster than income rises. This should end, make the benefits available to all with no penalty for working or income, but make them as basic and targeted as possible.

The same, old, conservative myth that social programs are a welfare trap that create poverty ... blame it on the government bogeyman.  As always, with not even an actual hint of evidence to support it.