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Income inequality has been on the rise in the U.S. for decades. The top 1 percent of earners in the U.S. now holds a much greater share of national income than three decades ago. At the same time, incomes for the bottom half of American households have remained virtually flat.

Some economists and social scientists argue that income inequality leads to unequal access to opportunity and resources like nutrition and education. That's left children born to poor families with little hope of escaping poverty themselves, they argue, and has made upward mobility unattainable for many in the middle class, as well.

But others say that income inequality is not inherently a bad thing. They point to research that finds that countries with greater inequality also experience more economic growth. That means that people at all income levels will benefit, they argue, even if their individual slice of the economic pie becomes smaller.

At the latest Intelligence Squared U.S. event, two teams addressed these questions to debate the motion, "Income Inequality Impairs The American Dream of Upward Mobility."

Before the debate, the audience at the Kaufman Music Center in New York was 60 percent in favor of the motion and 14 percent against, with 26 percent undecided. After the debate, 53 percent favored the motion and 37 percent voted against it, making the team arguing against the motion the winner of this particular debate.

Those debating:

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FOR THE MOTION

Elise Gould is the senior economist and director of health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, where she researches wages, poverty, inequality, economic mobility and health care. She is a co-author of The State of Working America, 12th Edition. Gould also co-authored a book on health insurance coverage in retirement; published in venues such as The Chronicle of Higher Education, Challenge Magazine and Tax Notes; and has written for academic journals including Health Economics, Health Affairs and Journal of Aging and Social Policy. She has testified before the U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means, Maryland Senate Finance and House Economic Matters committees, the New York City Council and the District of Columbia Council.

Nick Hanauer is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist with more than 30 years of experience across a broad range of industries. He has managed, founded or financed more than 30 companies, creating aggregate market value of tens of billions of dollars, including Amazon.com, Aquantive Inc., Insitu group, Market Leader and, most recently, the venture capital firm Second Avenue Partners. He is actively involved in a variety of civic and philanthropic activities and has served a broad range of civic organizations, including the University of Washington Foundation and the Seattle Alliance for Education. He currently serves as a director for the Democracy Alliance and as a board advisor to the policy journal Democracy. Hanauer has published two national bestsellers, The True Patriot and The Gardens of Democracy, with co-author Eric Liu. In 2012, his TED talk on income inequality went viral after TED, citing it as overtly partisan, declined to publish it on their website.

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Edward Conard, a former partner at Bain Capital, argues that the success of America's top earners actually spurs economic growth — growth that, in turn, has increased incomes at all levels of the economic spectrum. Samuel LaHoz hide caption

itoggle caption Samuel LaHoz

Edward Conard, a former partner at Bain Capital, argues that the success of America's top earners actually spurs economic growth — growth that, in turn, has increased incomes at all levels of the economic spectrum.

Samuel LaHoz

AGAINST THE MOTION

Edward Conard is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong. Prior to writing his book, Conard was a senior managing director at Bain Capital, where he headed the New York office and was responsible for the acquisitions of large industrial companies. He previously worked for Wasserstein Perella, an investment bank that specialized in mergers and acquisitions, and Bain & Company, a management consulting firm, where he headed the firm's industrial practice. Conard recently joined the Intelligence Squared U.S. board of trustees. His views in this debate are his own.

Scott Winship is the Walter B. Wriston Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Previously a fellow at the Brookings Institution, his areas of expertise include living standards and economic mobility, inequality and insecurity. Earlier in his career, Winship was research manager of the Economic Mobility Project of The Pew Charitable Trusts and a senior policy advisor at Third Way. His research has been published in National Affairs, National Review, The Wilson Quarterly, Breakthrough Journal and Real Clear Markets, among other outlets.

Every election suggests change, so given all the scandals involving football, now's an appropriate time to envision what reforms might be forced upon the sport. Well, I'll tell you: It's tough to mess with football.

Now, to begin with, from hindsight, it was probably misleading to call baseball "the national pastime." The claim was, essentially, based almost entirely on the fact that baseball was the only team sport that boasted a professional presence. The World Series was our World Cup and the Olympics rolled into one.

But really, below that top level, football always ruled our hearts. Unlike elsewhere, sport in America grew up as an adjunct to the classroom. Yes, there were the famous three R's –– 'readin, 'riting and 'rithmetic –– but the fourth R was rivalry. Beating the other school, the other college. In a few areas, most famously Indiana, basketball became the identifying school sport, but most everywhere it was football –– shown most vividly in Buzz Bissinger's Americana classic, Friday Night Lights. Even now, when schools in parts of rural America are forced to consolidate, what the little towns seem to miss most is not their school itself, but their school team.

Forget football's ugly violence. In contrast, it was primarily for sweet reasons that the sport ascended to cultural prominence. Baseball makes a great deal of its association with spring, with the beginning of nature's year, but, much more important, football begins in concert with back-to-school. That's always mattered. Baseball is every day, but football was always on the weekend; an event, parties, dances. Eventually, football even became the centerpiece of homecomings, a touchstone of the fond memory of our youth.

So much is made, and correctly, of baseball's attraction for fathers and sons. But football has an even stronger connection to boys and girls to, well ... to sex. Baseball has the seventh-inning stretch; football has halftime –– strike up the band and pretty cheerleaders to go with the macho players.

For a burgeoning United States that was flexing its muscles to the world, our manly football was the perfect sport to display the nation's youthful power. Baseball and basketball are about hand-eye coordination, primarily about skill; football –– coaches tell boys –– is about being a man. Maybe a lot of us need that even more now when as a nation we are frustrated. When fathers can't make the living their fathers once did and when men see women in the ascendancy.

That is surely why, for all the evidence now of how football batters male brains, it seems practically invulnerable to change. Football is simply too embedded in our American calendar, in our American culture, and in our American blood — and guts.

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Mexican Federal Police captured the former mayor of Iguala, Jos Luis Abarca, and his wife, Mara de los ngeles Pineda, near Mexico City this morning, the spokesman for the Federal Police said in a tweet.

If you remember, the federal government has been searching for Abarca since they accused him of ordering the capture of 43 college students. Authorities have said Abarca then ordered police to turn over the students to a cartel. Their whereabouts are still unknown.

The Mexican news site, Animal Politico, reports that authorities have issued three arrest warrants against Abarca.

"One for the killing of three people that happened in the clashes that led to the disappearance of the students; another, a tentative mass homicide charge for the disappearance of the 43 college students and another for the murder of a local leader in 2013," Animal Politico reports.

The details of this story are still emerging. We'll update this post, once we know more.

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Saying that the state's ban on marriage between people of the same sex violates the 14th Amendment, a federal judge in Kansas City is ordering Kansas to stop enforcing its ban. Today's injunction takes effect in one week, depending on whether the state appeals.

As we've reported, Kansas has attempted to sustain its ban on gay marriage despite the Supreme Court's denial of any hearings from states that were attempting to appeal rulings that overturned their prohibitions.

In today's ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Crabtree cited a 10th Circuit Court appeals court decision, Kitchen v. Herbert, which states that the 14th Amendment "protects the fundamental right to marry, establish a family, raise children, and enjoy the full protections of a state's marital laws."

Crabtree's ruling came in a case filed by the ACLU in Kansas on behalf of couples whose requests for marriage licenses were denied in at least two Kansas counties.

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