Most people who write about wealth distribution on blogs or popular political sites and forums, or make videos about it, don't seem to understand this, and so fail to start with a reasonable model of what a fair wealth distribution would be.
Back to the OP, when the top 1% has 24% of income (and 40% of wealth), that means there's a lot of luxury in the US which could instead be used to improve the life of some other less fortunate citizens. The economics rhetoric is clearly failing: the current wealth distribution is certainly not the most efficient distribution of resources if one is to include "quality of life" in the equation.
[1] http://www.oecd.org/eco/growth/economicpolicyreformsgoingfor...
But that was a time when the very rich had to pay up to 91% of income tax, and unions were everywhere preventing exploitation of middle-class jobs! OMG, the US was a Socialist country, thanks god we don't have this problem anymore!!
(Sarcasm aside, yes the world has changed and the exact same formula that worked in the fifties wouldn't work perfectly in the modern and globalized economy; still, in this case the present is so screwed up that even an imperfectly-fit clone of the past would work better)