“There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war,
and we're winning.”

-Billionaire Warren Buffett

Nearly one in four of the "super rich" will do their holiday shopping by private jet this season, according to a new study by Elite Traveler magazine.

Sounds nice. But I think I'll just hop on a $15 Chinatown bus and head to Washington. That's where I'm hoping I'll get my real present, in the form of a radically new federal agenda that does something about the rapidly fading American Dream.

Unlike the $90,000 that the average super-rich American will spend this Christmas on fine jewelry (yes, you read that right), new legislation isn't on their wish list.

And why should it be?

The very wealthy have been doing very well, and the feds have helped pad their plump pockets. The income of the top 1% of Americans more than doubled between 1979 and 2003. The richest 1% of Americans now control 35% of the entire country's wealth. And it's due in no small part to tax cuts - on income and dividends and capital gains and estate taxes - skewed toward the very wealthy.

All the while, average wages have stayed stagnant, while health care and college costs have skyrocketed. For the first time, this has forced the poor and the middle class to forge an alliance. See, the wealthy used to be able to count on one thing - that the rest of us would battle each other to the death. And we did. Whether it was welfare reform or public education, resentments between the classes put us on opposing teams.

The crazy creature comforts of the richest of the rich put the challenges the rest of us share - affording a decent education, health care and secure retirement - in sharp relief.

That's the only logical way to explain why six states passed ballot measures raising the minimum wage. Most of the people who voted for the initiatives weren't minimum wage workers themselves, but they understood they had more in common with the working poor than with those who spend $27,000 this December on electronics.

Look, I don't begrudge anyone their wealth. But I get a little cranky when 5,000 New Yorkers line up to fill 200 jobs at M&M World in Times Square that pay $10.75 an hour, while Christmas bonuses this year at the five largest Wall Street firms will total $36 billion.

So I'm going to D.C. to ask for a Christmas present: serious solutions. Bring down the cost of prescription drugs and higher education, pass a federal minimum wage increase and come up with an honest universal health insurance plan. And most of all, put the brakes on years of tax policy that disproportionately benefit the superwealthy while throwing crumbs at the rest of us.

So, while the superwealthy are spending, on average, $34,600 on entertaining, $22,300 on spirits for entertaining, and $42,800 on hotels for entertaining, I've got more a modest request for Santa.

All I want is a decent chance for the rest of us to achieve the American Dream. And maybe a bottle of cheap wine to toast to it.

Executive Director of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy