An interesting article about the 1% …CNN:Don’t blame the 1% for America’s pay gap

FORTUNE — What if I told you that there was a group of hard-driving workaholics who tend to have advanced degrees and bring a level of talent and skill to their jobs that attracts premium pay in the global economy? Scholars have found that this group is more likely than much of the population to raise their children in two-parent homes.

You might think this was a group people would admire, even emulate, right? Not so. For this is the much-maligned 1%, whose media infamy via the Occupy Wall Street protests, followed by President Obama’spopulist reelection message, is now firmly embedded in the American psyche.

The 1% club stands accused, accurately, of more than doubling its share of the nation’s income since 1980. By 2007 it controlled nearly 24% of total income, the second highest in history, after 1929. (In 2009 its share dropped to 17%, suggesting that recessions aren’t necessarily kind to the rich.)

I have a question?

What do the 1% do?

Have they invented battery technologies?

Gas extraction techniques?

Developed new surgical methodologies?

Pioneered new antibiotics or cancer treatments?

………………………………………………………………………………………….

Or are they at Goldman Sachs evaluating risk for wealth preservation funds?

Serving on boards after selling bonds at JP Morgan?

Overseeing job flight to the lowest labor cost at GE, OR APPLE?

Above the line people are PRODUCING WEALTH.

Below the line they are enhancing it on the production value of those above the line. (Tim Geithner, Glenn Hubbard, Henry Paulson, etc…)

Yes, finance is well-represented in the 1% club, but there is also an especially high portion of the self-employed, along with a variety of other professions. And while CEO incomes rose astronomically through the 1990s, their incomes have actually declined over the past decade, according to University of Chicago’s Steven N. Kaplan.

I don’t know the answer to this question (nor is this article an objective study of that), but my thesis is that the rewards for those who manipulate capital, spread risk, create debt to ease the inflation of demand have benefited out of proportion to those who invent, start businesses, and take risk at the street level. In fact if my thesis is correct, those below the line would regard those above it strictly as building blocks for ‘REAL WEALTH CREATION’.

What the masses sense beyond the envy and rage, and the #occupy idiots is that those in the financial markets, and such have arrogated to themselves a reward set backed by amoral eyesight and mental processes they simply do not deserve in a free open capitalistic society. They have been corrupted by greed (The GSA’s recent actions in Vegas is a PERFECT example of the mental processes which result in self justification of corrupt practices until they are ‘acceptable’)

And the penalties for those who work…

Scholars are also taking note of social issues underlying America’s income divide. In his new book, Coming Apart, conservative social scientist Charles Murray documents far higher divorce rates and more children living with one parent in working-class communities. That’s a trend that has also caught the attention of liberals like Harvard’s Robert Putnam, who describes “gaps that didn’t exist decades ago but are widening at an alarming rate today” and are reinforced as wealthy parents spend far more time with their children.