Who are "the one percent"? Mark Steyn elucidates for you

"Everybody knows the game is fixed
the poor get poor and the rich get rich.
That's how it goes; everybody knows".

(Leonard Cohen, "Everybody knows")

Nowadays, just about everybody knows that the rich in America are getting exponentially richer, while the middle and working classes are finding it harder than ever to make ends meet. And if you asked most people who's fixing the game, they'd point to the rich, with their lawyers and their lobbyists.  And if you asked them to name some rich people, they'd probably identify a Larry Ellison, or a Jamie Dimon, or a Carl Icahn, or just say, "Wall Streeters and hedge fund managers".

But if you asked Mark Steyn, you'd get a different answer altogether.  This is from one of his columns written in the past few days, as the US lurches toward a government shutdown and possible debt default.

In 2012, the top 10 percent were taking home 50.4 percent of the nation’s income. That’s an all-time record, beating out the 49 percent they were taking just before the 1929 market crash. With government redistributing more money than ever before, we’ve mysteriously wound up with greater income inequality than ever before. Across the country, “middle-class” Americans have accumulated a trillion dollars in college debt in order to live a less-comfortable life than their high school-educated parents and grandparents did in the Fifties and Sixties. That’s banana republic, too: no middle class, but only a government elite and its cronies, and a big dysfunctional mass underneath, with very little social mobility between the two.

Got that?  Inequality is rising because the Obama government is trying to redistribute income; and the rich are federal public servants and their "cronies".  It's hard to imagine that Steyn really believes this, but then again, it's hard to imagine that he really believes a lot of the stuff that he writes.  Still, if this really is the way that Tea Partiers and others on the right think, then they're even crazier than the rest of us thought they were.