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46.1	percent. And the middle class slid from 52.7 percent to 50.2 percent of household income in the same period.</br></br>This means that atter tour full years of ÛÏrecovery,Û at the end of 1986, ÛÏgood times" had seen the gap between the best- and the worst-off Americans increase to the highest level since we began keeping records of this data in 1947.</br></br>Put another way, we took $6 billion in income away from the most desperate people in the land between 1980 and 1985 simply by reducing their utterly unfair share of our economic well-being.</br></br>But numbers are only numbers, cold and impersonal. Translate them into just a few of their human consequences. They mean that people are not homeless simply because that have severe mental and emotional problemsÛÓonly a third of those on the streets fit into that categoryÛÓbut because they cannot pay for shelter in a society which reduces their income at the same time as it fails to build affordable housing, not only for the poor, but for the young families of the middle class as well.</br></br>We prefer to see spaced-out ÛÏbumsÛ sleeping on the grates of our winter streets. We cannot stand to look the children of homeless families in the face, for if we did, we might have to commit resources to housing instead of just sympathizing with odd people.