Another aspect to this . Is how "detached" everything is in America . Our Nation has poverty , there are poor , and homeless that need help . Yet no one is helping them . Detachment is alarming when we perceive all is well , but it is not well . The Stock Market gains after 4 years at an alarming rate . It's so much fun to own stocks these days, with the Dow Industrials and Wilshire 5000 index setting one new high after another, and the Standard & Poor's 500 within 1% of doing the same. Watching the value of your portfolio rise is such a delightful indoor sport. All this happiness and moneymaking (if only on paper) are what make Saturday's anniversary so interesting and educational. What anniversary, you ask? Why, the fourth anniversary of the market bottom, reached by all three of the major indicators on Mar. 9, 2009. You remember those days, don't you? It was a hideous time, with people losing their jobs, house prices collapsing, the world financial system teetering on the brink, and the U.S. stock market, as measured by the Wilshire, down a sickening 57% -- or $11.2 trillionfrom its high 17 months earlier.Stock prices are "propped up" by millions of buyers who want to own stocks at these prices. Those of you who see another market crash just around the corner should stay out of the market. Those of us who moved money off the sidelines into stocks four years ago are pleased with our choices.Who believes this garbage is sustainable. The ONLY reason stocks are this high is because of Bernanke and his printing press. If you think an 8 trillion increase in debt and devaluation of the dollar is worth it, have at it. The stock market is generally a poor proxy for the economy. Both, however, are characterized by extreme inequality, with large amounts of spending power concentrated at the extremes. "Companies know and they've sort of noticed that the consumers in the middle are not doing so well, said Chris Christopher, an economist at research firm IHS. However, they've realized that the upper income brackets are doing fine. Then there's people that are living paycheck to paycheck that are always looking for a good deal," As Christopher portrayed it, that has produced a "bifurcation" of the stock market, with companies harvesting profits by targeting customers at either end of the income spectrum. Those companies that stick to the middle tier just suffer, he said. Central bank prints $85 billion every month. How much of that money makes it into the middle class pockets? In the town that launched the War on Poverty 48 years ago, the poor are getting poorer despite the government's help. And the rich are getting richer because of it.The top 5 percent of households in Washington, D.C., made more than $500,000 on average last year, while the bottom 20 percent earned less than $9,500 - a ratio of 54 to 1. That gap is up from 39 to 1 two decades ago. It's wider than in any of the 50 states and all but two major cities. This at a time when income inequality in the United States as a whole has risen to levels last seen in the years before the Great Depression. The federal government does redistribute wealth down to struggling Americans. But in the years since President Lyndon Johnson took aim at poverty in his first State of the Union address, there has been an increasingly strong crosscurrent: The government is redistributing wealth up, too - especially in the nation's capital.
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