99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree.    

GOP Senator Tom Coburn: 
$30 Billion Aid For Richest 1% Is 'Sheer Stupidity'  - Link 

In 1729, when Ireland had fallen into a state of utter destitution at the hands of its British landlords, Jonathan Swift published a famous essay, "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being A Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public." His idea was simple: The starving Irish should sell their own children to the rich as food. 

Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at the University of California Berkeley Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, dug into the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances and:

    Then compared those numbers to the net worth of the six members of the Walton clan as reported on the Forbes 400 list in 2007. They are all children or children-in-law of the founders of Walmart. Their total net worth that year: $69.7 billion.

    That’s equal to the wealth of the poorest 30 percent of all Americans, according to Allegretto’s calculations. As if that's not outrageous enough, Allegretto also notes that:

    The new 2011 Forbes 400 has the inherited worth of these six Waltons at $93 billion. The 2010 SCF data that is slated for release spring of 2012 will almost certainly show a further widening of the wealth gap given that corporate profits, stocks and CEO pay have all recovered while housing values & equity (the lion’s share of wealth for average American’s), wages and family incomes have yet to turn around.

Six people. As much wealth as 30 percent of people. In 2007, the population of the United States was 302.2 million people. Six people had as much wealth as 90.7 million of those people. Or, to put it in another way, we're not talking about the top 1 percent. We're talking about the top .00000002 percent.