Happy non-recession day!

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Latest jobs report shows the economy is not recession yet. Hallelujah.

But unemployment is still at 9.1, 14 million people are out of work, a third of them for more than a year, and some of them have decided, what the heck, I’ll go to New York and camp out.

“We are the 99%” they chant — as opposed to the other 1%.

“The richest 1 percent of this country owns half of this country’s wealth, $5 trillion,” according to Gordon Gekko in Wall Street.

And that movie was 25 years ago. Today a member of the 1% has, on average, 225 times as much as a typical middle class household.

In fact, according to Politifact, the 400 wealthiest Americans have a net worth of $1.5 trillion. At the same time, the bottom 50% of American households, 155 million people, have a net worth of $1.6 trillion.

And as deserving as the 1% may be, the Wall Street protestors have got it into their heads that some of that wealth ought to be peacefully spread around through taxation.

And a few members of the 1% actually seem sympathetic.

There’s a group called Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength that’s pushing for a millionaires tax, for several reasons:

– They see that the trickle down theory is a myth; that in fact their own wealth trickles UP from a healthy middle class, because that’s who the customers are.

– They know that raising their taxes is not going to discourage them from creating jobs.

– AND they also know that when you have 14 million unemployed Americans, a third of them out of work for a year or more and who needed a job yesterday, that’s a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands to maybe camp out in parks, or surround banks, or log on to Google Earth to get a look at how and where the 1% live.

That could get noisy.

Photos: Occupy Wall Street protests from around the U.S.

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