[tankenmate]

But it was during the period of WWI and WWII that America became a super power. The syphoning of wealth from the general populace will ensure that America will no longer be a super power any more given a generation or so. America is repeating the economic history of a number of past empires; once the overall growth goes the rich try to take a bigger slice to keep their relative growth up, which leads to collapse. The transition of wealth to other countries like China has already begun.

If you have a look at the graph you'll see that in the 40' the top 95% was approximately 4 times the 20% line, by the end of the graph that is approximately 8x, so the ratio doesn't hold at all. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient and you'll see that the Gini index in the US has been steadily increasing, boiling frog style, since the 80's. I wouldn't be surprised if the US's Gini index was worse than Mexico by these days (i.e. the US has a bigger problem with the _relatively_ poor than Mexico).

If you look at the colour coded map of the world you'll see that Europe's socialist states, basically all of them, have less of a problem with the relative poor.