It’s not exactly news that the rich get richer, but just how rich they’re getting sometimes can be. For instance, The Washington Post reported earlier this month on a new economic study showing that the wealthiest 1 percent of American households now own an astonishing 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, up nearly three percentage points from 2013 and the highest since at least 1962.

The paper, by economist Edward N. Woolf, relied on data from the federal Survey of Consumer Finances and focused on net worth — the value of assets minus the value of debts. Woolf found that the top 1 percent of U.S. households now own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, much more than the comparable 1 percent of households in Canada, France, Great Britain and Finland.

Later that same week came news that even as the surging American economy added 228,000 jobs in November and companies in many sectors are struggling to find and hire new employees, wages rose only 2.5 percent over November of last year — only a little faster than the rate of inflation. According to The New York Times, this is a puzzle that economists are trying to get their heads around: When labor is scarce, wages should be rising much faster. Whatever the reason, it appears that the current strong economic run, which is now of several years duration, is not yet addressing wealth inequality in any meaningful way.

In a rational world, or one in which the 1 percent did not wield political clout commensurate with their economic fortunes, the tax code would be adjusted to redress this growing disparity in wealth, in the interest of fairness and economic advancement for millions. But not surprisingly, the Republican-sponsored “tax reform” legislation now pending in Congress proposes to do the opposite: bestow the biggest tax cuts on the richest households while in the long run taxing the poorest households more heavily.

Even more striking than this is that, according to the Times, the Republicans want to apply for the first time a higher tax rate to employee wages — which is how 80 percent of working Americans are compensated — than to income earned by proprietors, partnerships and closely held corporations. “We’ve never had a tax system where wage earners were substantially penalized” relative to other types of earners, said Adam Looney, a former Treasury Department official now at the Brookings Institution. Indeed, this effort runs counter to the goals of the 1986 tax reform enacted under Ronald Reagan, according to a former Reagan administration official.

Against this ugly backdrop, Bernie Sanders’ characterization of the pending legislation as “morally grotesque and terrible economic policy” appears to be a rare instance of understatement by the Vermont senator. Sanders declared that it “would provide massive tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, increase taxes on millions of middle class Americans, raise the deficit by more than $1 trillion, and lead to savage cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.” That is, if you don’t happen to be rich, the bill checks all the wrong boxes.

Don’t expect the Republicans to be deterred by Sanders’ rhetoric or the sober warning of economists that providing a fiscal stimulus to an already strong economy risks sparking inflation and setting the stage for a boom-bust cycle. Cutting taxes on corporations and the super rich is the central, and perhaps only, tenet of the party’s philosophy at present. It is disturbing, though, that this goal seems to be married in this case to a concerted effort to punish millions of ordinary working Americans.