America now has 2 million real-wage millionaires today, versus some 50,000 or so back in 1950.
So what you are seeing isn't that the poor are getting poorer, only that the poor are noticing that more and more people are getting rich, and that the rich are getting rich faster and faster.
That's to be expected. The whole system of capitalism gives rewards and incentives for continued new success.
What you are seeing is that an entire generation of economic growth and productivity has benefited only a very small percentage of the population. The average guy has actually gone backwards, especially when you figure in affirmative action and government expenditures. This is not "capitalism" but a Marxian parody of capitalism. And we haven't seen the real bad times yet. If a real depression hits, you'll see pent-up hostility explode like hasn't been seen in the US since the thirties, if ever.
In the United States, for example, wages of less-skilled workers have fallen steeply since the late 1970s relative to those of the more skilled. Between 1979 and 1988 the average wage of a college graduate relative to the average wage of a high school graduate rose by 20 percent and the average weekly earnings of males in their forties to average weekly earnings of males in their twenties rose by 25 percent. This growing inequality reverses a trend of previous decades (by some estimates going back as far as the 1910s) toward greater income equality between the more skilled and the less skilled. At the same time, the average real wage in the United States (that is, the average wage adjusted for inflation) has grown only slowly since the early 1970s and the real wage for unskilled workers has actually fallen. It has been estimated that male high school dropouts have suffered a 20 percent decline in real wages since the early 1970s.