Aaron Levenstein said: "Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital."
As a mathematician and a statistician, I could not agree more. It is amazing how presentation, can alter the perception of people of the same data. As I was trying to find a distribution that describes the income of household in the USA, I came across this chart. For the most part it is a Weibull distribution, but then you have that weird rise at the end. It is almost like the math is telling you "common that should not happen", but it does.
If you ignore the mathematical novelty for a minute, you can look at the above curve and think, so what. The number of people who make over $200k and $250k is still less than the number of people who make $5k and $10k respectively. But the above curve does not tell you the story. Associated with that figure is the figure below. Despite the fact that is goes back to 2007, it still tells the rest of the story.
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Source: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
It is not really about how much you make, it is about what you end up with compared to others. The conversion rate of your labor (if you work) to money (not currency) and money to tangible asset is what matters.
Further more, if you do not have control on your assets, that puts you at constant risk. And as we have seen in the stock and housing bubble, your net worth can be depleted in front of your eyes and you might not be able to do a thing about it. A lot of Americans are not only being capped from the top (limited wealth) but also being squeeze from the bottom by rising cost of the essentials such as health care and housing.