My posting from yesterday about unemployment benefits, so-called "class warfare," and the redistribution of wealth has generated a couple of emails. I've learned that although the official rate of unemployment is 10 percent for those with high school degrees and almost 15 percent for high school dropouts, it's only 4.4 percent for college graduates. So people living in affluent, well-educated, suburban neighborhoods like my friend C. don't always see the effects of the national joblessness, and can develop a mindset that it's "someone else's" problem.

One alert reader stated that although she agrees with me in principal, she thinks that I got the reason for the lingering unemployment wrong. The continued high rate of unemployment, she claims, is not due to businesses not rehiring their old work force, and pointed me to former Clinton-era Secretary of Labor Robert Reich's excellent blog, where he states, "Our jobs crisis is due to the collapse of demand in the U.S. after the housing bubble burst. No longer able to borrow against the rising value of their homes, the vast American middle and working class can no longer spend enough to keep the economy going."

This makes absolute sense to me. It's not because of immigration, or the Chinese, or Marxists in the White House not caring about the working man, it's because no one has enough money any more to actually buy anything. Who's going to hire employees to provide things if no one is buying them?

"If Democrats (or Republicans, for that matter) want to blame something," Reich continues, "blame America’s record level of inequality – an almost unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top, and a smaller proportion for the vast middle."

The evidence is all around us. It’s no mere coincidence, as Reich points out, that 1928 and 2007 marked historical high-water points for shares of national income going to the top 1 percent. Today’s median wage is now 5 percent lower than it was at the start of the decade, taking inflation into account, while top earners are doing better than ever.

But it wasn't always like this. Malcolm Gladwell recently pointed out in The New Yorker that "There was a time, not so long ago, when people at the very top of their profession - the 'talent' - did not make a lot of money. In the post-war years, corporate lawyers, Wall Street investment bankers, Fortune 500 executives, all-star professional athletes, and the like made a fraction of what they earn today." In 1935, he points out, lawyers in the United States made, on average, four times the country's per-capita income. By 1958, that number was 2.4. The marginal tax rate on income above two hundred thousand dollars a year was as high as 91 percent. In 1975, supermodels like Lauren Hutton were paid $60/hour, and had to work six sessions a day to make a comfortable living. The rich were doing very well, and the very rich, those who inherited their fortunes, were doing very well indeed, but the wealth in America was distributed much more evenly than it is now.

Today, the core assets of most Americans are their homes, whose values are now 20 to 40 percent below what they were three years ago, while, as Reich points out, the key assets of America’s wealthy are shares of stocks and bonds, whose values have declined far less.

So what's needed then to get the unemployment rate down and the economy functioning better is to get more discretionary income into the pockets of middle- and working-class Americans. Tax cuts for those in the median income brackets will do this, as will, on at least a temporary basis, extending unemployment benefits. Nancy Pelosi, it turns out, had it right after all - extending unemployment benefits will, in fact, help create jobs.