Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist and one of Amazon's first investors,
gave a TED Talk about income inequality in the USA. TED's staff didn't post the video because it was "explicitly partisan", there was a big brouhaha, they eventually posted it under another account, etc.
He makes some good points. Also some bad ones. Referring to people as "consumers" isn't too helpful. Maybe if we had a fully cradle-to-cradle manufacturing system.