Many decry rising inequality because it makes those who've fallen behind feel impoverished. But it's done much more than cause hurt feelings. It has also raised the real cost to middle-income families of achieving many basic goals. The process begins with the completely unremarkable fact that top earners have been spending at a substantially higher rate than before. They've been building bigger mansions, staging more elaborate weddings and coming-of-age parties for their kids, buying more and better of everything.

Pass down values every day through your actions, your words and your time with your kids.

When people bump up against one another in the course of pursuing their goals, it is in everyone's interest to resolve any resulting problems in the least costly ways possible.

For the three decades after WWII, incomes grew at about 3 percent a year for people up and down the income ladder, but since then most income growth has occurred among the top quintile. And among that group, most of the income growth has occurred among the top 5 percent. The pattern repeats itself all the way up. Most of the growth among the top 5 percent has been among the top 1 percent, and most of the growth among that group has been among the top one-tenth of one percent.

Many decry rising inequality because it makes those who've fallen behind feel impoverished. But it's done much more than cause hurt feelings. It has also raised the real cost to middle-income families of achieving many basic goals. The process begins with the completely unremarkable fact that top earners have been spending at a substantially higher rate than before. They've been building bigger mansions, staging more elaborate weddings and coming-of-age parties for their kids, buying more and better of everything.

We could curtail private spending by several trillion dollars a year without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone. That would be more than enough to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and eliminate government indebtedness once and for all.

When the economic pie grows larger, it's always possible for everyone to have a larger slice than before. So it's really in all of our interest to make the economic pie larger by eliminating waste whenever and wherever possible.