This is a misguided policy toward fairness. Rising inequality is a 30-year process with its roots in skills and education -- not tax policy -- and creating punitively high top tax rates to fund checks for low-earners does not address the underlying issues.
The phenomenon described above is something any reasonably far-sighted person could have discerned as our economy has moved in stages from agriculturally-based, to "smokestack", to "information", and now, it appears, to "imagination"-based. The Wall Street Journal discussed this matter thoroughly in a series of editorials two decades ago. Continually, the WSJ spoke of "returns to education" increasing as our economy became more knowledge-based. This fact of life raises a whole host of questions about policy-making, not least of which, it seems, is whether certain people in policy-making positions are going to pretend to ignore it for political reasons.
The topic of how returns to education, and not tax cuts, is the root cause of (previously) widening income/weatlh distribution is properly the subject of a book, so it's going to be difficult to keep all I have to say to reasonable post length. The first hurdle to clear in analyzing the phenomenon is whether one will choose to accept that widening income distribution is a function of education becoming more and more valuable as an economy becomes more and more knowledge/information/imagination-based. The next point of analysis would be: is this bad, and if so, what do you do about it?
Personally, I am not real keen on widening income distribution, for reasons that are rarely, if ever, discussed in the popular media. However, it has to be viewed in the context of alternatives. If the creation of greater wealth by virtue of both a greater store of and ability to manipulate and apply knowledge and information is taken as a good, then why would you want to discourage the same by, for example, taxing it? Do we really want to discourage the accumulation of knowledge in the name of "distributive fairness"? As preposterous as this notion sounds, I think it is particularly so because the more freely knowledge is accumulated, manipulated, and applied, the greater the increase in living standards in, for example, the lowest income quintile. This, to me, is especially important because that is where increasing living standards is especially important.
Conversely, slowing the accumulation of knowledge and its application by artificially suppressing the application of knowledge is the same as slowing the creation of wealth, which is going to hit the poor the hardest. Taxing capital gains, dividends, and interest, as well as ordinary income, at higher rates is the functional equivalent of suppressing the accumulation and application of knowledge. It is a burden on wealth creation. And lest you think to yourself, "who cares about wealth creation, the wealthy have enough", I ask you to analyze the matter in light of recent experience. The opposite of wealth creation is wealth destruction, and if some rich person has 50% of their wealth destroyed, they're still rich - if a person of more modest means has 50% of their wealth destroyed, they're in trouble. You may have greater wealth equality, but you also have more hardship.
To sum up, growing disparities in wealth (which have likely been more than arrested in the last six months) were the result not of Bush or Reagan tax policy, but of the modern economic reality of education's greater and growing value relative to unskilled or modestly skilled labor. Addressing this problem by instituting policies that cause wealth destruction may bring greater equality, but hurt lower quintile earners too much. A better approach is to continute to encourage accumulation and application of knowledge through education, seek to expand true educational opportunities and choice, and expand awareness among those who do not avail themselves maximally of education that opportunities abound for separating from those who do all that excess cash they'll be accumulating. That, and maybe reducting the supply of lower-skilled workers by clamping down on illegal immigration. You think any good liberal would be keen to help the poor among us by applying that basic fix?
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