Who's Hit Worse, Rich or Poor?

Apropos Floyd Norris today, I've been wondering whether this is one of those unusual recessions where the rich get hit worse than the poor. It's certainly true that limited partners with leverage and margin and hedge funds and whatnot have been hit hard, financially. It's also true that if you have very little in the way of assets or liabilities, but you do have a job, then you're probably liking the way in which many common goods and services are becoming significantly cheaper -- especially gasoline.

What's more, as any good student of the hedonic treadmill understands, going from rich to significantly less rich is in many ways worse than starting poor and staying that way. But still, it's really hard to gin up much in the way of sympathy for the multi-millionaires-turned-mere-millionaires. And you only need to take one look at a place like Detroit to see where the real damage is being felt most acutely. It's not hard to choose between bailing out Detroit and bailing out Greenwich.