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Bernard Madoff is worried about leaving his wife with sufficient funds, which is nice. She’s been his sweetheart since high school, and after he goes off to a minimum-security prison, he doesn’t want her to wind up scooping tuna salad in a sandwich shop.

His goal is to make sure she keeps not only their luxury Manhattan residence but also some cash. He’s thinking $62 million would be about right.

Here’s one way to ease his mind: Among American households, only the top 1 percent earn as much as $350,000 annually. If Ruth Madoff just keeps $62 million under her mattress – she might be a little leery of investment advisers right now – and if she can scrape by on $350,000 every 12 months, she’s good to go for 177 years.

Even if she really, really likes the Saks Fifth Avenue shoe department, she shouldn’t run out of walking-around money for a century and a half.

So unless she comes from extraordinarily hardy stock, Ruth Madoff should be set for life.

There’s another way to do the arithmetic, and it gets us to zero much more quickly. For most folks, it’s hard to understand why the Madoffs should get to keep any of the money at all.

Even more important to understanding how this nation works, most Americans can’t comprehend having scores of millions of dollars in the first place. They look at their paycheck, they look at their bills – they just don’t get it.

As John Edwards used to say, there are two Americas. This carried a lot more weight before we realized what he was really thinking: “There are two Americas, and I deserve a woman for each one.” Still, he had a good point, and it’s becoming clearer every day.

Another concerned husband, former Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc. CEO Richard Fuld, reportedly transferred his $14 million oceanfront home in Florida to his wife for $100 last November, the same month he was named in a $150 million lawsuit. A nice legal tactic to keep the house in the family.

In Top America, it’s assumed that somebody else will take the loss. Specifically, all of those saps who believed the hype. Fuld knows how the game is played, and when the law comes in handy, why, he doesn’t mind using it, not at all. Ethical concern for others is more problematic; it can be hard to lock onto and has a tendency to fade in and out.

Before all of this happened, we relied on the entertainment industry to show us how Top America lives. Someone would get a few million bucks for playing 30-year-old hit songs, $20 million for playacting in a movie or $245 million for playing baseball, and we wondered if maybe they could reduce the ticket prices a little.

The National Basketball Association’s Latrell Sprewell once turned down an offer from the Minnesota Timberwolves for $21 million over three years, pointing out that he had a family to feed. Someone noted at the time: If you can’t feed your family on $7 million a year, you may not be budgeting properly.

Meanwhile, in Bottom America, people will stand in a long line for a free lunch.

The experiences are galaxies apart, but before we choose up sides, we probably should check for common ground: It’s just faintly possible that we all share the motive, just not the means and opportunity.

There might be a Madoff lurking inside all of us. If you never find yourself alone in a bank vault, you’ll never know what you would do.

An old, old book teaches us that the love of money is the root of all evil. Not money, but the love of it.

These days, we prefer to love money and covet possessions, because that’s the version of the American dream we like best. But dreams fade pretty quickly when you wake up in jail.