Former U.S. Rep. Fred Heineman of Raleigh got into trouble a decade ago when he said his $180,000 annual income placed him in the lower-middle class. Local radio DJs were soon asking listeners to fax photocopies of money to help out poor Fred.

My mother-in-law thinks that if you take your family to the International House of Pancakes on a Saturday morning, you're rich -- or at least act like it.

My own definition is that anybody who owns a house Inside the Beltline, has a beach house, drives a Mercedes and is a country club member is rich.

In the early 2000s, the top 5 percent of North Carolina families had an average income of $183,253. The poorest 20 percent had an average annual income of $14,884.

Those figures are from a new study that shows the gap between North Carolina's rich and the poor is widening.

That is a bad thing, according to the N.C. Budget and Tax Center, a liberal advocacy group based in Raleigh.

"When the benefits of growth are concentrated among a few families, others have a much harder time providing for their basic needs, moving out of poverty, building wealth and providing opportunities for their children," said John Quinterno, a spokesman for the budget center.

But speaking in Raleigh last week, Steve Forbes, the magazine publisher and former presidential candidate, said inequality is not necessarily a bad thing.

The economy, Forbes said, is not a zero-sum game. When Bill Gates or Steve Jobs make billions, that contributes to inequality. But it doesn't make others poorer, Forbes said.

Billionaires tend to be very fond of Forbes, which might be one reason why Forbes was brought to Raleigh by Jim Goodnight, the founder of SAS, the Cary software company. Even by Fred Heineman standards, Goodnight is rich. Quoting Forbes magazine, Goodnight is the 51st-richest American, worth $4.1 billion.

Goodnight's billions throw Cary's equality rankings out of kilter. But that doesn't mean that I, as a Cary resident, make any less. In fact, Goodnight has done many worthwhile things in my community -- not the least of which is to create a lot of good jobs.

Defending billionaires is a dirty job. But someone has to do it.

Although Democrats often blame Republican tax cuts for the growing inequality -- and assuredly the cuts have played some small role -- most economists think that the trend is being driven by rising wages for skilled workers and lower wages for unskilled workers.

After all, the gap between the rich and the poor is growing all over the world -- and you can't blame that on George W. Bush.

Far more worrisome than inequality is the steady proportion of North Carolinians living in poverty: a family of two making less than $13,078 per year. The rate has remained stuck at 12.9 percent for the past 16 years.

Quinterno has a point when he says, "There are two North Carolinas -- one for the state's richest families and another for the rest."

But that may be a problem of poverty, not one of inequality.