The just-released Congressional Budget Office report, Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007, supports a basic claim of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement sweeping the country: that deep economic inequality is corrupting politics, culture and American society as a whole.

CBO reports are almost universally considered and relied upon as epitomes of non-partisan research. Simply put, the CBO report shows that over the last quarter century (1979 to 2007, to be exact), the top 1% of income earners enjoyed far, far bigger real income gains than the other 99%. As a result, the share of total income earned by the top 1% rose dramatically – doubling from 10% to 20% – at the expense of falling shares of income for all of the other99% of the US population.

No wonder the OWS movement showed genius in crafting and adopting the slogan "We are the 99%." No wonder polls already show a majority of Americans expressing sympathy with the OWS movement barely five weeks after it was born – a stunning achievement relative to comparable mass movements in US history.

The CBO numbers teach some basic lessons. First, the last 30 years of ideological preaching about the superiority of private, deregulated, market-driven capitalism served to enable and mask one of the largest and fastest upward redistributions of income in modern history. The gap between the tiny rich minority and everyone else widened dramatically. The CBO report thus documents the actual class war over recent decades: the real winners and losers. The report thereby exposes