I spent this past weekend driving through neighborhoods much like the type my parents took me through on those Sunday mornings so long ago. But the large homes with driveways filled with Mercedes and BMWs seemed like relics from a different age — much like the $1,500 shoes that The New York Times recently reported were flying off the shelves of certain Manhattan boutiques.

The images of these massive homes and $100,000 cars seemed to clash with the morning headlines announcing a downgrade of the United States’ credit rating and the death of 30 U.S. troops in an endless, expensive war. And while America stumbles toward default, millions of Americans are unemployed and the middle class keeps getting squeezed.

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In late 2009, Business Week reported that the divide in corporate America was only getting worse: “While we’re seeing record-low budgeting for base salaries, we’re seeing record-high budgeting for bonuses.”

The article showed evidence that CEO bonuses were at their highest levels in the 33 years the data have been recorded.

“What’s counterintuitive,” according to a compensation expert interviewed by Business Week, “is that the highest level of funding for bonuses is occurring in the heart of the recession.”

“Counterintuitive” seems to be a bit of an understatement. Shortsighted and stupid better describes a trend that cannot be seen as good for the long-term health of America’s economy.

While these income disparity trends were bad under George W. Bush, they have only gotten worse over the last three years.

Since 1970, executive pay has increased 430 percent while workers’ wages have crept up at a pace that barely kept up with inflation. The average executive’s pay has jumped over that time period to 158 times that of the average worker’s pay in those companies. It’s no wonder that the top 0.1 percent of income earners get richer by the day while millions of Americans are seeing their situations get worse.

This is not John Wayne’s America. This is Gordon Gekko’s America.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that if the Duke faced one of these CEOs in a John Ford film, he’d kick some ass and force the leech to start treating his workers fair. And you can bet that my Republican father would be cheering him on from the front row of the theater.

That’s not to say that Dad would ever want the government to step in and tell companies what to pay their executives. He wouldn’t — not in a million years. But he would ask what became of the America that he knew, where working hard and playing by the rules always paid off.

This weekend I began to wonder, 40 years after those Sunday morning drives, whether parents across the country still embrace the American Dream with the evangelical fervor that made a 7-year-old boy sitting in the back of a Buick believe that in America, anything is possible.

A guest columnist for POLITICO, Joe Scarborough hosts “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and represented Florida’s 1st Congressional District in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2001.