If I could require every member of Congress and every state legislator to read just one thing, it would be Teresa Tritch’s essay, The Rise of the Super Rich.
Tritch is a highly respected journalist who has written about economics and finance for many years. And she relentlessly documents in this article a threat to America far greater than any Saddam Hussein could ever have imposed.
She shows that a tiny fraction of the super-rich are increasing their wealth at a rapid rate, while the rest of us are treading water or falling behind. Worse, we now have policies deliberately designed to make this gap perpetual, and to even widen it.
That sounds like something out of the predictions of old-time Marxist dreamers, who hoped to see something like this because, they thought, it would help speed the coming revolution. But this essay is being written by a sharp-eyed former bureau chief for that capitalist consumer rag, Money Magazine.
Using government statistics, she shows that the lion’s share of the benefits of the current boom are going to the top one percent of Americans. That is, families making more than $315,000 a year. And actually, about half of the money going to them is going to the top one-tenth of one percent of them, the multi-millionaires. Looked at another way, the poorer half of the population accounted for 2.5 percent of the nation’s wealth two years ago, and probably even less today. This year, the average tax cut for households making more than $ 1 million a year was $112,000. The poorest got virtually nothing.
And despite staggering deficits, the Bush Administration has been fighting hard to make these tax cuts permanent. At the same time the President signed a bill that would cut programs like Medicaid and food stamps by nearly $100 billion over the next decade.
The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting less and less reason to think they have a stake in this society.
That alone should worry the super-rich. I think what has happened is that the greedy think that with the fall of Communism, they no longer have anything to worry about.
Socialism has, after all, been pretty much completely discredited as way to run an economy. But in our new world of imitation laissez-faire, the classic Marxist analysis of what’s wrong with capitalism is starting once again to make sense.
There’s a scene in Dr. Zhivago that haunts me. War has begun, and all the workers are filled with patriotism and can’t wait to fight for the czar. And the one communist in the movie couldn’t be happier. “When their new boots wear out, they’ll be mine,” he says.
He was right, of course. So those making policies for the super rich might ask themselves -- when the last jobs are outsourced, and we repeal the last tatters of the safety net . . . What happens then?
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