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Income inequality in the United States consists of two gaps. The first gap is an upper-lower gap, between those with a college education and those without. The second is an upper-upper gap, between those with high incomes and those with extraordinarily high incomes.

As best-selling writer and investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out in The Black Swan, safe occupations are those where the worker is paid a fixed amount per unit of time. An accountant or a nurse is not going to become extremely rich or extremely poor; they could be called “billers,” because they bill for their time. On the other hand, a professional singer or a software entrepreneur is playing in a winners-take-most tournament. The difference in talent between an international pop star and an unknown lounge singer may actually be quite small. However, the nature of these fields is that the difference in rewards can be enormous. People who choose these sorts of occupations could be called “players.”

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Well, duh. There’s that old democracy thing rearing its ugly head again.

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In 18 months of searching, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine and Office of Professional Responsibility chief H. Marshall Jarrett have uncovered new e-mail messages hinting at heightened involvement of White House lawyers and political aides in the firings of nine federal prosecutors two years ago.

Well, duh. These prosecutors serve at the pleasure of the President. If he wants to fire them for wearing the wrong tie, he is perfectly entitled to do so. This is like saying “Warren Buffet implicated in the firing of one of his vice-presidents”.

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If you’re looking for racism in American politics, look no further.

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In a political year unlike any in Alaska’s short history, Stevens’s extraordinary resilience might prove as reliable as his indictment was upsetting. The man who first went to Washington in 1956 to lobby for statehood has, as the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, shipped home the highest number of federal dollars per capita in the nation, nurturing along the way a paternalism that earned him the nickname “Uncle Ted.”

And that, in a nutshell, illustrates why our current political system is structurally dysfunctional. The way to succeed in Washington is to get re-elected. The way to get re-elected is to bring home enough pork that the constituency thus established is sufficient to do so. That’s all it is. So long as legislators can buy votes with taxpayers’ money, the system will continue to reward that sort of corrupt dealing. The best way to win a game is to cheat, and our political system rewards, rather than punishing, cheating.