Well, it’s good news for a number of Americans who, if you gathered them together, you could fit into a hockey rink. Of course, I’m speaking of those Americans residing in the top-tier of wealth. While the vast majority of Americans have suffered greatly during the past several years, according to this report in the LA Times from earlier this week,those in the top one percent have done very well for themselves:

No group was immune to the downturn. In 2008, as the financial crisis raged, the stock market hit bottom and the Great Recession ate into the economy, the number of millionaires in the United States plunged.

But last year the number of millionaires bounced up sharply, new data show. And after that decline and rebound, the millionaire class held a larger percentage of the country’s wealth than it did in 2007. “It’s been a recession where everyone took a hit — with the bottom taking a bigger hit,” said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies economic inequality. But “the wealthy alone have bounced back ...”

[Boston Consulting Group’s] latest report on wealth, one of the first broad depictions of how wealth shifted in 2009, indicates that the number of U.S. households with at least $1 million in “bankable” assets climbed 15 percent last year to 4.7 million after tumbling 21 percent in 2008. “Assets have recovered much faster than we expected, to be candid,” said Monish Kumar, a managing director at Boston Consulting Group.

But the consulting firm’s report showed an increase in the concentration of wealth in the last two years. In the U.S., the number of millionaires in 2009 remained 10% lower than in 2007, but the percentage of Americans’ total wealth held by those households was slightly higher, at 55%, according to the consulting firm.

In the meantime, millions of Americans continue to face unemployment (an incalculable amount jobless due to corporate outsourcing), while millions of others have watched their nest eggs dwindle as pension funds were sacked and home prices tumbled — all due to Wall Street gambling.

It’s ironic (and tragic) that, while so many Americans have played by the rules, and got screwed for it, the slender minority that gambled and lost were rewarded through bailouts and bigger bonuses. The obscene payoff for failure.

Many of those same failures (as gamblers and as humans) turn around and hide their wealth in offshore accounts, not putting a dime back into the system, looking out for themselves without a hint of concern for the rest of the country.

It’s funny (in an hilarious-because-it’s-so-pathetic way) that the teabaggers (and yes, that’s what they began calling themselves so I allow them to hang on to that term) speak out for the well-being for corporations and hedge fund managers but are silent on the plight of the average American. Teabaggers rail against socialism, oblivious to the fact that we’re already a socialist country: in our version, wealth is redistributed to the top instead of to the bottom.

Look, I’m not one of those people who resents someone making a bundle of money — if somebody is savvy enough to do well financially, more power to them, congratulations.

However, the growing inequality of the distribution of wealth is probably the largest obstacle in the path out of recession. Capital is finite, it doesn’t magically appear out of the ether (unless skyrocketing inflation is the desired result). With that capital concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, there is less to be spent on the very goods and services that fuel economic growth.

The calculus is simple. As you move closer to income and asset equality, the more those assets and equitable incomes circulate, financing the creation of jobs, research and innovation, growth and capital expansion.

Instead, we’re still hearing that the wealth flowing to the top will trickle down and water the ground where magic ponies will pop up and feed everyone candy.

Except it hasn’t. Very little of the wealth that has benefitted the top tier is making its way to capital investment, jobs creation or technical innovation. What trickles down is mostly into services that support a lavish lifestyle.

So, good news for just a few. I’m not holding my breath for the moment when they share that good news with the rest of us.