Income inequality, income disparity, end of the middle class, the working class, the working poor.

For the first time in our history, there is a strong belief that the next generation will be worse off than ours: Younger people are “nesting” with their parents, and economic dignity and security are in decline. Or in the words of that old Depression song: “There’s nothing surer, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

Why and how has it come to this? Government policies or their lack have consequences and create ripple effects everywhere.

A recent New York Times business section article, headlined “Equation Is Simple: Education = Income,” featured a photo of President Franklin Roosevelt signing the GI Bill of Rights 70 years ago that paid college tuition for veterans and tapped into a great resource for building a prosperous American future.

Now, the article notes, “… the United States ranks near the bottom in the share of its working-age citizens who surpass the education attainment of their parents.” Policies that tilt toward the haves and ignore the have-nots shrink rather than increase the great American middle class, upending traditional improvements for the next generation.

A Federal Reserve Board’s 2013 survey indicates that “the median family headed by someone 35 years of age earned … 6 percent less than similar families in the 1989 survey. Thought to be recession-related and cyclical, it shows that … three years after the recession ended … most of the lost ground has not been recovered.”

Over the past 30 years, wages have declined or stagnated while CEO salaries have soared. Between 1979 and 2012, the median wage earner became 74.5 percent more productive but saw just a 5 percent pay increase. CEOs were the big winners of the productivity gains.

A Harvard Business School survey finds that Americans are unaware of how wide the inequality gap really is. Americans estimate the ratio of CEO-to-worker income at about 10 to 1, but think that it should ideally be 7 to 1. In reality, the ever-widening gap is 354 to 1, a disparity the survey calls “unsustainable.”

While UFT retirees are doing well and are only indirectly affected by the widening inequality, we have an interest in what is happening to others, our own family members included. After all, we devoted our professional careers to improving the lives of future generations and had a stake in building a better, more secure society. We are concerned that the progressive social contract built up over a century is collapsing.

A troubling aspect is that many senior citizens, especially nonunion retirees who have seen their pensions whittled down or disappear, vote against their own economic interests. Perhaps that’s due to cultural issues or because the messaging comes from elected officials with whom they have a comfort level for other reasons so the schemes to defraud retirees on Social Security, Medicare and downward pension restructuring get overlooked.

This country has done something about income inequality in the past with programs that encourage education, raise the minimum wage, and secure and advance Social Security, Medicare and health care. So government and political policies matter. If we can end tax credits for those outsourcing jobs and have corporations pay their fair share, we will begin to make progress.

What can we do?

Let’s support the Koch sisters, the AFL-CIO’s progressive antidote to the Koch brothers. The Koch sisters are two labor-friendly, activist women, not related to either of those infamous brothers or even to each other. They are union sisters who care about the issues that we care about and describe themselves as “two average women who have raised families and worked hard all our lives.”

For years, the Koch brothers have used their billions to support conservative issues and candidates and to privatize Social Security, Medicare and the nation’s public schools. The Koch sisters serve as a balance to the policies the Koch brothers champion. Since 52 percent of Americans are not even aware of the insidious work of the brothers, the AFL-CIO will feature the Koch sisters in a series of online and TV ads in hotly contested Senate races and to get out the vote.

There’s a website — www.kochsisters.org — where visitors can provide contact information and engage through social media.

We have to remain a part of the long battle that labor and its allies have been fighting for decades. And it is important, no matter what the temporary setbacks are, to be long-range optimists. History is on our side and we must always be happy warriors.

Even that old Depression song about the rich and poor ends up with, “In the meantime, in between time, ain’t we got fun!”