The ever increasing income disparity is at the root of much of what is wrong with America today as it was at the turn of the century with the ”robber barons” who amassed and held the wealth (e.g. Astor, Rockefeller, Morgan, Mellon, Carnegie, Stanford). The working class, (everyone else) struggled 10 hours a day, 6 to 7 days a week to feed and clothe the family. In the cities there were sweatshops and in the country farm labor, share croppers, and itinerant workers. Eventually a middle class as we understand it, emerged following the depression and WW-II that gave hope to most people that they would have better lives and their children would have even better ones. The pendulum appears now to be swinging back. Our children and grandchildren likely will not have the educational and employment/professional opportunities or standard of living that we had.
The consequences of wealth disparity then and now, continue to be directly associated with the many dimensions of health and quality of life. Lower life expectancy, poorer nutrition (obesity), less education, fewer leisure possibilities, more hopelessness, and more incarceration are just a few of the more prevalent consequences. Our jail populations are increasing faster than the population at large and vast majority of inmates come from the under-classes. This is not a chance phenonenom.
The CIA … started monitoring infant-mortality rates around the world because they are a good indicator of where a country is headed. Ours isn't doing so well.
We lag behind other developed nations on a number of measures of health and well-being, all of which have a correlation to income inequality. Despite our wealth, we're 34th among U.N. member nations in life expectancy at birth, according to CIA estimates. Inequality generates lots of stress at every level of society,…
The degree of inequality a society tolerates says something about how people view each other and the ideal community, and those views are reflected in public policies and private choices. Right now ours says each person is on his own.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/...
One sad truth about this disparity is that often the exploited inadvertently contribute to the problem in that either they do not vote, or if they do their vote is not always in their own best interests. For example, Washington State, like most is undergoing severe cuts to social services, healthcare, and education. The voters last fall had an opportunity to restructure the tax system in Washington State and ease these cuts by passing Initiative 1098 that would have taxed the wealthy, those making over $400,000. By a resounding 64% to 36%, it was defeated. The result is cutting healthcare for the poor, decreasing social services, and drastically increasing college tuition by up to 22% at the University of Washington. Clearly among those 64% who voted against this initiative, were many who would have benefited from the initiative’s passage.
On a more positive note, it is interesting and heartening that this campaign pitted high ranking officials at Microsoft, a local company with a large numbers of multimillionaires and billionaires, against the spokesperson for the initiative, Bill Gates Sr., father of the Microsoft founder, who said:
"Poor people and middle-income people are paying too much to support the state and rich people aren’t paying enough. That’s the starting point for me.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/...
It appears that once such a system evolves, it becomes a self perpetuating plutocracy. The richer many individuals get, the less likely they are willing to pay taxes commensurate with their wealth and the more they are able to leverage their wealth into ever more income producing ventures. The middle and lower classes work harder, if they can find work, and pay a disproportionate percentage of their incomes to taxes, housing, and healthcare. Those who cannot afford housing or healthcare are on public assistance, homeless, or in jail with little hope of things ever changing. And as noted above, they might also contribute politically to their own detriment. So on it goes. To reverse this process would seem to take a major cataclysm, like a depression or a world war that rallies everyone and brings all to a common cause. The depression and the WW-II draft were great equalizers. Must change require such extreme events?
The wealthy including those on Wall Street, argue that they earned the money and that their wealth provides jobs for others. Thus, they say their money works for everyone’s wellbeing like the trickledown propaganda that we were fed during the Reagan era and currently by the Wall Street magnates. The evidence for this is sparse at best. For an interesting expose on these magnates, see Jeff Madrick’s book: Age of Greed: The triumph of finance and the decline of America, 1970 to the present. (Knopf) Also see Paul Krugman and Robin Wells’ review of this book, in the NY Review of Books, July 14). This book describes several “catastrophic” financial debacles since 1970, including the latest (2008-2009), perpetrated by Wall Street and the prime instigators such as Milton Friedman - “free market” can cure all ills, and those who followed his mantra. The similarities are chilling as reckless insiders squandered money, had little substantive regulation, and finally got government bailouts. Sound familiar? The result of each of these fiascos was that the rich got richer and the rest of us lost savings, homes, and jobs. From Krugman and Wells:
There are a lot of villains in this story—so many that by the end of the book we were, frankly, suffering from a bit of outrage fatigue. But why have villains triumphed so repeatedly?
The proximate answer, clearly, is the abdication of regulatory oversight. From junk bonds to derivatives to sub-prime mortgages, regulators either turned a blind eye or were impeded by business interests and politicians—Democrat as well as Republican. Undoubtedly the most outrageous act—and the most economically damaging to the country—was Greenspan’s refusal to use regulatory powers at his disposal to rein in the exploding sub-prime market, despite being warned repeatedly that a catastrophe was brewing. Like Reagan and Friedman, Greenspan firmly believed in greedism; in his view, the financial markets could do no wrong.
http://www.nybooks.com/...
What will it take to reverse the pendulum this time around while the republicans and tea partiers call for more deregulation? The only thing I can think of is to elect more progressive votes to congress. If not, we will continue to flow with the pendulum of deregulation and ever increasing inequality. To initiate change we have to begin phoning and doorbelling now as the elections are only 16 months away. All segments of our communities must be educated concerning the consequences of their votes and non-votes. We must campaign at the local, county, state, and national levels to change the pendulum flow toward greater equality.