‘It was $5, right?” I was at a convenience store in northern Missouri, filling up with gas, and the guy next to me was checking his gas budget with the lady in the passenger seat of his car. He was driving what might be the last K-car on the road. He noticed that I had overheard their conversation and turned to me and said: “I hate dollar and diming it, but if five bucks is all you have, that’s all you can spend.”

The ongoing chatter about the income gap means inequality will surely be an election issue in 2016. I live in a small and relatively poor community in northwest Missouri. I’ve never heard my neighbors discuss income inequality in line at the local quick stop or anywhere else, although poverty is widespread. If my admittedly anecdotal evidence is any guide, income inequality is an issue trickling down from the top rather than bubbling up from the bottom of society. That the national conversation is about relative inequality rather than absolute poverty is because the former issue is particularly vexatious to the academics, journalists, and civil servants who are driving the conversation. Although they have the kind of incomes my neighbor with the clapped-out Dodge can hardly imagine, they’re prickly, because even a couple with two low-six-figure incomes is an order of magnitude short of private jet and summer in the Hamptons territory. I’d love to know the average income of the folks showing up to hear Bernie Sanders, but I’d bet that few of Bernie’s fans are stuck in 40-year-old junkers with duct tape securing the brake lights.