You seem to miss the point that this is a zero sum game, you only have 100% of the pie to go around. If the top 1% take more of it, it means the other 99% get less. So it does in fact matter how much the top earners make because it will lower the median income if they take more money.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
Who says? The top 1%, in any given year, mostly consist of capitalists (literally: people who invest capital for a living) or rentiers (people who control commons resources like land or mineral wealth). The top industrial sectors, often the only healthy sectors, in most of the developed world, are now: FIRE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate), Resource Extraction (basically: energy and raw materials), and technology (us on this site).
Income has always been divided between capital, labor, and rentiering (even though economists like to operate in a True Scotsman Efficient Market, where rentiering is eliminated by perfect competition). Recently, more and more of that income has been going to capital and rent, less to labor [1]. "Since labor income is more evenly distributed across U.S. households than capital income, the decline made total income less evenly distributed and more concentrated at the top of the distribution, and this contributed to increased income inequality."
So actually, what we are seeing is very much class warfare, in the Marxist sense of the word. Even the tax system (normally the tool of obnoxious redistributive Big Government) is now configured to favor capital over labor [2], contributing to income inequality, the deterioration of national infrastructure, and the accumulation of national debts.
“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
[1] -- http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/commentary/2012/2012-13... [2] -- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every...
A better indicator of economic health is to look at changes in the individuals with highest net worth. In countries with government-granted monopolies, the list remains relatively constant year upon year. In more competitive countries, the list churns new wealth in with the old.
I do wish we could get over this "1% vs 99%" meme though. Incomes are mostly continuous as you go up the scale. The change in annual income / net worth of the bottom guy in "the 1%" and the top guy in the "the 99%" is immaterial.
If the article is warning us that we're on the brink of a Depression, mentioning the 1927 stats, I would like to see some sort of charts showing this 1% slice over time[1].
And for "the rest of us," it isn't the fault of "the 1%" that median incomes haven't matched productivity gains over the last 40 years[2]. This is where more scholarly work should be focused, in my opinion. Basically, it doesn't matter how much wealth the top earners have, as long as the median income is growing. The headline and article are simply engendering class warfare instead of examining the deeper causes of median income stagnation.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2008_Top1percentUSA.png
[2] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Productiv...