I've said the above to say that the aspirations of Obama and the Democratic Party to redistribute the earnings of the affluent to the poor, so many who are non-productive, will change America forever, as the man promises.
The primary source of wealth redistribution in America, currently, is one of redistribution from the poor and middle class to the rich. While labor productivity has risen almost 50% in the past four decades, wages for all but the top 3% of Americans, adjusted for inflation, have remained stable.
That means that essentially
all of the productivity gains of the American worker since 1970 have been redistributed to the very wealthy, whose productivity has not increased by any measurable extent.
I was born in Nebraska in 1935 in the midst of both severe drout and depression. Nobody starved.
It's widely agreed on by sociologists that as many as 200,000 people may have died as a result of privation and malnutrition during the Great Depression.