I've been expecting the rich to feel pinched regardless of how much they appreciate the Bush tax breaks. The New York Times published some anecdotal evidence Sunday, in a piece by Christine Haughney titled "It's Not So Easy Being Less Rich." Some scattered quotes:

One of her clients recently confessed that his net worth had decreased to $8 million from more than $20 million, and he thinks that his wife will leave him. He has hidden their fall in fortune by taking on debt to pay for her extravagant clothes and vacations. [ . . . ]

Interviews with the people who actually see the bank statements, like divorce lawyers and lenders, say their clients are definitely living on less than they did a year ago, regardless of how expansive the definition of "less" may be. Hair stylists and private jet rental companies say the wealthy are cutting back on luxuries like $350 highlights and $10,000-an-hour jet rentals. Even nutritionists and personal trainers notice a problem. The wealthy are eating more and gaining weight because of the stress. [ . . . ]

Other wealthy clients are cutting luxuries that they think their friends and relatives won't notice, according to Mr. Del Gatto of Circa. At Circa's midtown offices, he said, the seven consultation rooms have been busy with customers selling their precious gems. Some older couples, he said, are selling estate jewelry to help support their children who have lost Wall Street jobs. Bankers are paring down their collections of Patek Philippe watches. Wives from Greenwich and Scarsdale are selling 2-carat to 35-carat single-stone diamond rings. One recent client explained to Mr. Del Gatto that she was selling $2 million in diamonds she rarely wore, because her friends wouldn't notice that they were gone. [ . . . ]

The drop in wealth has also exposed other personal problems, like bad marriages. Money -- which bought jewelry or extravagang vacations -- helped smooth over many of these difficulties, said Kenneth Mueller, a psychotherapist in the East Village who works with many Wall Street bankers and real estate developers. Now, he said, his clients "catastrophize" smaller bonuses or shriveling stock portfolios. "You have to remind them that there's something that has always been there," he said. "All the money helped mask the anxiety."

Not sure which way this breaks politically. It seems to me that as long as the US economy was growing at a substantial clip, as it was up to around 1970, most of the rich were content with their split of the expanding pie. However, when things started to contract in the 1970s, the rich got more aggressive, taking their cut at the expense of everyone else. The sort of inequity that has ballooned so under the Republicans is proving hard to sustain, not least because so much of it turns out to have been smoke and mirrors. So one way the rich may react is to try to turn the screws on everyone else even harder. Problem is, those screws are getting pretty tight, and we're going to see more and more pushback. Won't be pretty.