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In Alabama, some low-income people pay income tax at a higher rate than the wealthy. "The state's powerful timber industry, which owns 71 percent of the land, pays 2 percent of the property taxes. Meanwhile, we overtax poor people with punishing high sales taxes even on groceries, reaching 11 percent in some countries," she says. At the same time, the state's infrastructure, including public education, is ranked near the bottom of the 50 states. "We are not prospering," she adds.

While Alabama is an extreme case, Hamill believes it should be a warning about what can happen when the burdens start getting shifted onto middle- and lower- income people. She's concerned that in the national tax debate, "people are not looking at it from any moral framework other than, 'Whatever I've got, I've earned, and it's all mine.' "

People of faith see this issue from varying perspectives, however. The Rev. Robert Sirico, who heads the conservative Acton Institute for Religion and Liberty, says it's important to recognize the role that economically successful people have in ensuring a dynamic and prosperous economy - that the majority of their wealth is invested and is employing people.

"While I agree that Americans tend not to have a very sophisticated moral understanding of social and financial obligation," he says, "part of the problem is that when tax rates reach confiscatory levels, as high as 50 percent, it causes people to react and want to keep it all."

Father Sirico favors a flat tax, where everyone pays the same percentage of their income and the poorest of the poor are exempt - a direction in which some say the US is heading. He sees the progressive system, which taxes higher incomes at a higher rate, as not only unjust, but as proportionally decreasing economic productivity.

Others take issue with that view. "If you look at economic performance over time, or at international comparisons, there is no evidence that more unequal income distribution is good for economic growth," insists Bernard Wasow, senior economist at The Century Fund.

In Mr. Wasow's view, a progressive tax is fairer. "Economists generally talk about the burden a tax places on a family, and it's a question of imposing equal burdens," he says.

Richest nation with highest poverty

Many of those concerned with rising inequality agree that it is not the gap per se that is the problem, but what is happening to people at lower income levels.

"I'm less concerned with the ratio between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent than with what's happening to the bottom 20 or 40 percent," says Ron Sider, head of Evangelicals for Social Action. "It's a scandal that the richest society in human history has the highest poverty level of any industrial nation."

People of other faiths share that concern. "Poverty is a theological issue from a Jewish perspective," says Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, because it "assaults a human being's dignity as the image of God." But, he adds, "I worry even more about the dignity of a society that allows people to be impoverished."

In Islam, the Koran's emphasis on a just society requires that every Muslim give 2.5 percent of his wealth each year to the poor. "Yet most Muslims would say, too, that public policy must address poverty," says Ihsan Bagby, of the University of Kentucky. "If God doesn't want disparity between rich and poor, then that has to be addressed at all levels of society, from political leadership to corporate managers down to the individual."

While tax policies are far from the only means to attack poverty - education, minimum wage, the faith-based initiative, and welfare reforms are also seen as key - many see the large tax cuts as undermining the country's capacity to support those programs adequately.

They say that bringing moral considerations into the economic debate is essential to the well-being of a democratic society.

"We must be concerned with the ratio of unequal wealth because money is power, and when it

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