Are you being screwed?
The cover of the current Rolling Stone magazine (Dec 14 issue) invites readers to discover “How the Super-Rich are Screwing America.”
Inside, we find the less-provocatively titled article,”The Great Wealth Transfer” by Paul Krugman, a leading economist and columnist for The New York Times. In it, Krugman explains how the wages of most Americans have fallen behind inflation, while the wealthiest 1% of the population now has more than five times the wealth they had just a generation ago.
Does it matter that some people (ok, a very, very small number of people) are getting ahead (ok, way, way ahead) while most of us stand still or fall behind where we were 10 or 20 years ago?
I guess that depends on your point of view. If you’re someone who’s getting ahead, or planning on getting ahead, then maybe you look up to the super-rich with a mixture of admiration and envy”you want to be them. But as Paul Krugman points out, “America actually has less social mobility than other advanced countries…. Not only can few Americans hope to join the ranks of the rich, no matter how well educated or hardworking they may be”their opportunities to do so are actually shrinking. As best we can tell, pretax incomes are now as unequally distributed as they were in the 1920s…”
And if you are not one of those aspiring to be super-rich, then I think it rankles even more. Why should some people, working the same eight or nine-hour workday, make 1,278 times more than you do? Well, that’s exactly how it is at Wal-mart. The average salary for non-supervisory employees is about $18,000 (many of them without health benefits). The chairman of Wal-mart, however, makes $23 million a year, plus an abundance of perks. This isn’t inherited wealth; he works for it, just like anyone else works for their wages. (Those who don’t work, and get their income from dividends and capital gains, are even further ahead, thanks to recent tax cuts on those items.)
Well, so who cares? The rich get even richer, same old story, right? Well, not quite. The rapidly growing wealth of the super-wealthy is coming from somewhere. Turns out it’s coming from you.
Paul Krugman writes, “All indicators of the status of ordinary Americans”poverty rates, family incomes, the number of people without health insurance”show that most of us were worse off in 2005 than we were in 2000, and there’s little reason to think that 2006 will be much better.” So this is ‘the great wealth transfer’: the wealth is leaving the middle and working classes, and trickling up to join its friends at the top.
But this isn’t an irreversible state of affairs. America is still a democracy (isn’t it?) and we the people can choose how we want it to be. To quote John Lennon,
and so this is Christmas (war is over…)
for weak and for strong (…if you want it)
the rich and the poor ones
the road is so long.
Wisest thing anyone has said on this blog. Good for you.
My buddy just showed us this post. Good going kid. Glad someone is sticking up for common decency and democratic priniciples.
With you around, Gravatar won’t mean GR(EED)AVATAR(GOD).
I understand your point about “this is a democracy, can’t you just vote it for yourself”…..well this is exactly what one of our founding father’s meant when asked what kind of government they had created when they responded “It is a democracy, if you can keep it”.
I believe that was a warning not to be greedy about it all. Vote for opportunity, but don’t forget to make people work for it. (give them the ladder, but require them to climb it themsleves)
The problem otherwise is one we see too clearly cause the problems with socialism (or communism) where no one has an incentive to do anything and guess what….no one does.
No, the problem in the USA is quite the opposite….our country as a whole is providing less value to the world, and we are losing our pay it. We are in horrible debt, not just the government debt, but our trade debt…and the world is currently keeping our currency afloat…the only reason the world needs us right now (for the most part) is because we are the big consumers…and if they want to become the big providers, they need consumers until their own consusumers come up to speed. (and they are at an amazing rate) Once we lose our mantel as largest consumer, we are finished….cell phones will come with Chinese written on them and we will have to learn to deal with that and many other things. (and BTW, our dollar will be worthless and everything will be expensive.
We are suffering the redistribution of wealth that occures with shrinking wealth….and the average person isn’t a wealth conserver, but rather a credit user….so they are on the wrong side of the coin. (teach people to save and you will have half your problems you describe licked…..teach them to “vote the money from Peter to pay Paul” is not the solution because unfortunately, what we need from the global perspective right now is more value per person not just “reajusting the chairs on the deck of the Titanic”.
Our “free trade” policies have set us up for this, and lest us not forget, this was also voted on in the past. (let’s not forget that “great sucking sound” predected by Perot…..so it was from Asia instead of Mexico….same problem)
Featured this week in “Carnival of the Insanities” item 22
http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2006/12/carnival-of-insanities_10.html
Bigqueue: regarding that great sucking sound quote … Perot himself fired Americans and offshored almost all the jobs in his company to India too. What a freakin hypocrite! And to think I voted for him!