The ad, embedded below, is scheduled to appear in the upper northwest quadrant Monday through Thursday of this week, and asks “What were you thinking?”

In addition to King, the organization has nearly identical ads airing in criticism of U.S. Reps. Ryan, Chip Cravaack (R-Minn.) and Sean Duffy (R-Wis.). In total, the ad buys are costing five figures and are being done in conjunction with an automated call campaign in 23 Congressional districts throughout the country that began last week.

In Iowa the automated calls follow this script:

I’m calling from Americans United for Change.

On April 15th, your Congressman Steve King voted to end Medicare and its guaranteed health care benefits. Instead, he wants to give seniors a voucher, forcing them to go out and find coverage from private insurance companies. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates this proposal will increase seniors’ out-of-pocket costs by $6,000 each year — and Congressman King is using the savings to give corporations and millionaires another tax break. Congressman King even voted to slash Medicaid funds that pay nursing home care for seniors and the disabled.

Call Congressman King at 202-225-4426 and tell him that cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to pay for tax cuts for corporations and millionaires is just wrong. Tell him to keep his hands off our Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

While there has been little shortage over the years of progressive outrage directed at King, it hasn’t been commonplace for national groups to spend money in an effort to target him. This has been because the existing 5th District hasn’t been considered competitive. This particular ad buy signals that either national organizations view the newly remapped 4th District as being somewhat more competitive or that they believe a high-profile Democrat could make inroads come 2012 — or perhaps a bit of both.

Advertisements for the Health Care Compact Alliance, whose leadership includes Houston construction mogul Leo Linbeck III, are plastered all over Monday’s email from Rasmussen, containing the results of two surveys, one showing that nearly 70 percent of respondents are “Still Angry At Government’s Current Policies” and one showing that 58 percent “Now Favor Health Care Repeal.”

Read the Texas Independent for previous reporting on the Health Care Compact Alliance.

The email also links to a commentary written by The Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone touting conservative policies in Texas and other states as the reason for rapid population growth in those areas, compared to states such as California.

In the column, titled “The Eyes of Texas Are Sparkling in the 2010 Census,” Barone writes:

“California for the first time in its history grew only microscopically faster than the nation as a whole (10 percent to 9.7 percent). Metro Los Angeles and San Francisco increasingly resemble Mexico City and Sao Paulo, with a large affluent upper class, a vast proletariat and a huge income gap in between.

Public policy plays an important role here — one that’s especially relevant as state governments seek to cut spending and reduce the power of the public employee unions that seek to raise spending and prevent accountability.

The lesson is that high taxes and strong public employee unions tend to stifle growth and produce a two-tier society like coastal California’s.”

On the contrary, a 2008 study by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed income inequalities in California and Texas to be comparable. In terms of income ratios (calculated by dividing the average family income of high earners by that of middle- or low-income earners), California ranked 8th among the states when comparing the top quintile to the bottom quintile, 3rd when comparing the top quintile to the middle quintile, and 9th when comparing the top 5 percent to the bottom quintile. A ranking of 1st would signify the state had the most income inequality.

Texas, meanwhile, ranked 9th, 5th and 11th in those categories, respectively.

In the mid-2000s, the bottom quintile in California on average earned $18,312 (in Texas, $16,088); the middle quintile earned $50,981 (in Texas, $44,574); the top quintile earned $145,358 (in Texas $126,658); and the top 5 percent earned $243,386 (in Texas, $211,038).

In both California and Texas, income for high-earners increased at a faster rate than income for low- or middle-earners, both when looking at changes from the late 1980s to mid 2000s, and changes from the late 1990s to mid 2000s.

That means little to the 14.9 million Americans out of work, of course. Unemployment tends to lag recessions, meaning that it takes some time for businesses to rehire workers after an economic shock, and in 28 percent of U.S. households, one member is still seeking a full-time job.

But how long until businesses start hiring again? Yesterday, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put out this ominous chart:

As the chart shows, it might take months and months for the economy to return to full employment. In reality, the chart is not quite ominous enough: Most economic evidence implies that the United States won’t return to an unemployment rate in the five percent range for years and years. Economists at the Kansas Fed examined the phenomenon in a paper called “How Will Unemployment Fare Following the Recession,” released at the end of last year.

First, they note that after deep recessions, the U.S. economy tends to rebound quickly. Why? Businesses initially react strongly to the bad recession, laying off workers, producing fewer goods, and selling off their inventories. When demand returns, those businesses need to hire workers and produce a lot of goods again, and fast, to keep up.

But, unfortunately, that dynamic has not been true for the recent recessions. Businesses lay off workers and stop producing goods as the recession hits. But when the recovery happens, businesses just make do with less — adding hours to existing workers, and rebuilding inventory slowly. This produces the “jobless recoveries” you hear about.

Moreover, recoveries tend to take longer after recessions paired with banking crises, like the Great Depression. And, yes, this recession kicked off with a massive meltdown on Wall Street, followed by woes in the commercial banking sector and the collapse of hundreds of small banks.

What does that mean? Years until employment recovers. By the Fed economists’ projections, the U.S. unemployment rate should hit 6.5 percent — a still-elevated rate — in 2018.

A new report shows that the income gap between rich and poor in America is at an eight-decade high — the largest differential since the period immediately preceding the Great Depression. And economists fear that the education and job-creation programs that could bridge this gap are lacking in the recessionary economy.

[Economy1] On June 25, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a report on the growing income gap in the United States. While the data it studies are not new — the income stats end at 2007, just before the advent of the current recession — the report synthesizes both census and Internal Revenue Service information to paint a more complete picture of the finances of the various strata of American society.

“It’s given us the first clear, comprehensive picture of income distribution over the economic cycle that ended in 2007,” said Arloc Sherman, senior researcher at the CBPP. “Now we know definitively that income inequality grew in that cycle. Just before the recession hit, we know that inequality was heading into record-breaking territory.”

In 2007, 17.1 percent of all after-tax income in the country went to the top one percent of earners. According to Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who used a slightly different methodology in calculating his figures, the proportion of the country’s income going to the top one percent is at its highest since 1928.

The CBO data studied by the CBPP show that in just under three decades, the after-tax income for the top one percent rose by 281 percent. By contrast, incomes for the middle quintile of income distribution rose a much more modest 25 percent over the same time period, while incomes for the bottom fifth increased by only 16 percent. If Americans in the middle fifth of the income distribution curve had seen their incomes rise at the same rate as those of the top one percent, that would equal an extra $13,000 in annual income for middle-class households, says Sherman.

A variety of factors, some stretching back a generation or more, have played a role in cultivating this inequality. Throughout the generation following World War II, incomes rose in a more evenly distributed manner, and a broad middle class was established. This trend reversed itself in the 1970s, when the income gains of the rich started outpacing those of the rest of the country.

Economists say there were several factors at play, some of which might have been unavoidable. The growth of technology rendered low-skill manufacturing jobs redundant. Globalization accelerated this decline as companies moved their production facilities offshore to take advantage of lower labor costs. The shift from a manufacturing to a service economy weakened the collective bargaining power of unions, a key force in establishing the wages on which America’s mid-century middle class was built.

“Union contracts helped bolster wages across the distribution, and the manufacturing sector was historically a highly unionized sector,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank. Declining union membership since the 1950s has eroded manufacturing wages.

Industrial and corporate deregulation added fuel to the fire. Executive compensation swelled even as the minimum wage failed to keep pace with the rising cost of living. Shierholz said a robust minimum wage doesn’t only benefit those who are paid minimum wage. Rather, that baseline impacts lower-income wages across the board.

Tax policies also widened the income gap. While many point to George W. Bush’s tax cuts as a key accelerant in the runaway income growth of the wealthy, economists note that other, long-standing parts of the federal tax code played a role as well.

“Our housing policy, with the mortgage interest reduction, is absolutely ridiculous in that most of the subsidies go to the richest people,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The net result is that the middle class today is in a precarious position, and the working class even more so. For much of the past decade, loosening credit standards and rampant consumer lending fueled by the housing bubble camouflaged the increasingly skewed dispersal of resources.

“The notion that ever-increasing home prices are going to provide us with wealth is clearly not sustainable,” said Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard University. “There was a mirage of consumption growth, so some of the growth of inequality didn’t fully show up in consumption rates,” he said.

While the drop taken by the stock market during the recession has diminished the level of inequality from the 2007 levels shown in the CBPP report, the middle class is struggling more than ever as a result of the housing crash. “It’s a huge issue,” said Baker. “They’re getting to retirement and seeing most of their wealth vanish, since most of that wealth was in their house.”

As problematic as this is for the middle class, the households at the bottom of the income ladder are even worse off.

“One of the things we know about the bottom fifth is that it’s harder for them to move up,” said Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress. “We talk a lot about encouraging people to work their way out of poverty, but without middle-class jobs, this consigns those at the bottom to staying there.”

Economists fret that the legacy of the wealth chasm will be greater than simply a shaky foundation for the country’s already-slowing recovery. Profound inequality sows the seeds for social unrest and widespread disenfranchisement.

“Politics have become increasingly rife with class conflict,” Boushey said.

The EPI’s Shierholz concurs. “When you have both high inequality and low mobility, we’ve turned into a place that’s inconsistent with American values,” she said. “It becomes a set class system.”

Even though the recession has put a small dent in the income gap, most economists agree that if the status quo holds, the trend will continue apace when the economy rebounds. Following the dot-com crash and 2001 recession, the incomes of the top one percent dropped from 20.6 times that of the middle fifth to 14.3 times as high. But this flattening of the income distribution disappeared when the economy recovered. In 2007, the top one percent earned 24 times as much as the middle fifth.

Economists say there’s no silver bullet for narrowing the income gap, but a number of policies and programs could help. First up, says Chad Stone of the CBPP, is letting the Bush-era tax cuts expire on schedule. “That will return rates at the top to approximately where they were at the boom of the 90s,” he said. Some say the imbalance could be partially offset by a more progressive federal tax code, a higher minimum wage and legislation that gives workers more bargaining power, while CEPR’s Baker suggests what he terms a “financial speculation” tax to capture some of the outsize profits generated by Wall Street and the financial sector.

But economists say the real key to regaining lost ground, especially for the middle class, is cultivating large numbers of jobs in new and growing industries like green technology and health care, and providing unfettered access to higher education so middle- and lower-income Americans can train for these careers.

“I think it’s widely agreed that education plays a huge role here and more so than in the past,” said Ron Haskins, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “The problem is a lot of people don’t have skills, and that’s because our high school dropout rates are high and people don’t go to college.”

The flip side of that coin is having jobs available for young people after they’ve invested in their education. “There’s potentially a lot of growth in health care and skilled manufacturing, but we need to do a much better job of providing access to training,” said Harvard’s Katz. “The traditional jobs that have provided wages to the middle class are clearly not doing well in today’s economy and are unlikely to come back. We need to think about a different middle class.”

“What we need is a policy conducive to innovation and entrepreneurship,” said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank. “You need the energy of invention just as we saw in the late 90s. We need another spurt of innovation-fueled growth.”

“Inequality is one of the great structural challenges facing America,” Marshall continued. “It raises questions about whether the American dream still works. … That’s why it demands attention from policymakers as something we’ve got to squarely face.”

Many states face fundamental legal barriers to accepting such loans. The constitutions of a number of states explicitly bar the state from borrowing funds to cover operating expenses. Other state constitutions or statutes strictly limit the amount of debt that the state may incur, and in some states, such loans would exceed the limit. In addition, most states have balanced-budget requirements that may bar them from accepting operating-budget loans. As a result, most states likely would not be able to accept federal loans.

Some help that would be.

Because most states are legally required to balance their budgets each year (ie, they can’t borrow their way through a recession like Washington can), the holes can be plugged only a handful of ways: By reducing spending through program cuts and employee firings; increasing revenues with tax hikes; tapping into rainy-day funds; or calling on the federal government for a cash infusion.

President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to make help for states the first priority of his White House tenure. For the nation’s governors, Jan. 20 can’t come quickly enough.