This is a bang-up piece.  Thank you.

What does "Reagan conservatism" is a meaningless statement. It's a personality cult.

Democrats, or liberals, aren't "FDR or JFK Liberals", we're New Dealers. For us it's about policy not personality.

When conservatives say they're like Reagan, they mean they liked his talk, his manner, his looks - his actions they try not to think about.

George H. Bush considered Reaganomics as "voodoo economics".

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/vood ooeconomics.asp

Coincidently Paul Samuelson wrote in his yesterday's must read NYT op-ed piece

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and the governors of the European central banks avoided the preventive policies that could have averted most of the present meltdown. They had falsely believed that unregulated capitalism could dodge the bullet of depression. That's proved to be a wrong belief everywhere.

The 2008 election brought an end to Bush administration blunders, and to other post-Reagan "make the poor and middle classes subsidize the ultra rich" enactments. These are bad morals and not justified by higher growth efficiency.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/opinio n/24iht-edsamuelson.html

"That's income. Wealth is even more highly skewed." I'm so glad you pointed that out. An understanding of that concept is fundamental to understanding the true nature of the divide, and why solutions that look only at income disparities are completely inadequate.

I would suggest that people are prohibited from escaping wage slavery and starting their own businesses (or partnerships) by our Health Care Insurance schemes. Republicans should love Single Payer for that very reason, but they are so very very stupid.

I'm guessing you would be astounded by the salary of the Stanford President, and Professors have also done quite well.

The basic thesis is that the American middle class has experienced a shift of risk from the the wealthy and other institutions directly to the middle class that in prior generations were not so heavily placed on the middle class.  We are expected to address more liabilities and debts to maintain basic economic status.

Wage stagnation is part of it, but it is only one half of the coin. The other half is shifting of risk regarding healthcare, housing, retirement, education, and even a debt safety valve issue like bankruptcy. In the case of bankruptcy, after saddling you through various risky transactions with debt, you may have a much more difficult to time of addressing it under bankruptcy laws.

There are other ways as well- the size of the entities you are being asked to negotiate with in the private sector are becoming larger because antitrust laws are not being enforced. Nor are media concentration laws being enforced. And, if they are, they are watered down. So, you negotiate contracts that are heavily weighted against you because although there is not collusion, the entities are big enough to say take it or leave it without there being very many other choices. Your perception of your economic life is shifted because media must be more of a commodity to service not the need to make a profit, but to service the size and conservatism that these organizations have become.  

It is not simply a matter of American consumerism of products as is popularly believed. Americans can not keep within their means because all aspects of their economic life , whether needed or wanted, are too expensive or require greater risks.  Thus, it is also largely a function of covering the cost of the basic economic tools of being in the middle class or being exposed to greater risks.

There are several books I recommend. But one that I like a lot is "The Great Risk Shift" by Jacob S. Hacker. The book goes more deeply into the personal responsibility b.s. that we find from Reaganism, in which we shift from addressing the fact that markets are systemic issues regarding risk taking while pretending that economic outcomes are solely determined by individual action.  This does not mean that individual risk does not matter. It simply means that we have ironically shifted the situation in the U.S. in which individual risk has a decreasing impact of one's ability to get ahead.

The chief way to address this shift is to move from neoliberal capitalism, which both parties have been adherents to for the last 40 years (thus why we are all children of Reagan) to a more middle class version of capitalism, or one in which you maximize wealth for the largest number of people in society.

You do this through focusing tax policy like cap gains on middle class endeavors like small businesses, rethinking trade agreements to address labor issues, take incentives out of off shoring, cut the cost of health care and education (not just make it more affordable since it is already to costly compared to income to begin with), re-establish a system of retirement, re-create a balance in the bankruptcy laws, and many other proposals that are out there.

"I was shocked and dismayed to learn that 74 percent at the nation's top 146 colleges and universities now come from families in the top quintile of income. And just three percent come from the bottom quintile."

However, many top-line private universities have needs-blind admission. We admit -- yes, I am a professor -- and then give financial aid as needed, up to at some schools, full freight, tuition, room, board, books, travel. I suspect that does not even matters out completely.

I am inclined to agree that there is an issue here, but I don't believe it has much to do with Ronald Reagan.  You might look harder at the academic standards that schools supply and parents are willing to support, but I am not sure the challenge is there, either.

The size of the administrative burden, the number of Vice Presidents, Vice Chancellors, Associate Assistant Deans, university services,...seems to grow with time.

If you want the full measure of how much has changed for the working class since Ronald Reagan was elected, compare my experience to the way things are now.

I graduated from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1980 -- before Reagan was even the Republican nominee.  Tuition the year I started was $280 a semester. I spent four years in Madison, none of it paid for by either of my parents.  I supported myself by delivering pizzas and got Pell grants, Basic Educational Opportunity Grants and other grants that are long forgotten remnants of the Great Society.

I graduated with NO student loan debt and even managed to save $3,000, which I used to finance a year in Taiwan polishing my Chinese.

My two brothers had basically the same experience, at least financially.

My public school teacher parents were able to put toward their retirement the money that today they would have had to spend financing the education of their three kids.

Your tags say it all, and explains much about where America is today: income inequality, Ronald Reagan, social mobility. Not much more needs to be said. Still, I look forward to more articles on this topic.

Damning Reagan is political suicide for Democrats as too many Democrats remain Reagan Democrats, not far from the Clinton moderates. But we are in a new age and it is possible that eventually, most people will come to appreciate how they were snookered economically by the Reagan-Bush thieves.

This is an old joke.

Carter: You know Ron, you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
Reagan: And that's you second mistake, Jimmy. You can.

I forgot what the first lesson was that Reagan taught Jimmy Carter. Reagan won, and that's all that matters, and it has been significant for thirty years now.

"14.7 percent of Europeans are self-employed while just 7.3 percent of Americans are self-employed." A big reason for this disparity is that if you strike out on your own in America, you have no health coverage. Even if you could afford the outrageous premiums for the health insurance monopoly's junk "coverage," the deductibles and copays will eat up your startup savings in nothing flat. This excellent post provides yet another reason for single-payer, Medicare-for-all health coverage.

No question that income inequality continues to grow and that education is one area where that is most obvious. However, it is somewhat disingenuous to suggest that someone with an income of $50,000 in the late 1970s or early 1980s was not well up in the high end of the economic ladder - mininimally $150,000 in today's dollars, using the most modest way of calculating the change over 3 decades - expecially if you consider how much less of people's income went to housing and education in those days, ironically, the very point Charles is describing.

The Reagan years were much like the Roosevelt years in the 1930's.  Just like the New Deal, most of Reagan's policies(low tax rates on the wealthy, deregulation of many sectors) are here to stay.