In the words of David Frum, Republican apostate and gadfly, "If the social order comes to seem unjust to large numbers of people, what happens next will make Occupy Wall Street look like a street fair." And at least one lobbying firm has been caught in what conservative bastion Forbes describes as an anti-Occupy "smear campaign." Surely they're not alone. We've got the power elite worrying, folks. Let's not mess this up. I'm concerned that we're creating a long-term vulnerability for the progressive Occupy movement when we allow and even encourage the media to define its main concern with the words "income inequality."
This catch-phrase is catnip for someone like Karl Rove or Limbaugh. What is the opposite of "income inequality," which we're against? "Income equality," which we will therefore be accused of supporting. "Yes, little right wing children, the big bad commie progressives want every single person in America to make exactly the same paycheck, no matter what they do, the supply and demand for their skills, how well they're trained, or how they perform." Obviously, absolute "income equality" is not what most progressives would propose. Progressives have no problem with a CEO making more money than the janitor. And a skilled engineer making somewhere in between. What we abhor is a CEO making more in one single day than the non-union contract janitor has any hope of making in his whole health-care-less life, with such a vast degree of disparity in income and consequent opportunity that these two people and their families might as well be of different species or live on different planets, for all the similarity and connection their lives might have. We're not seeking income equality, but income fairness so that America doesn't continue devolving from a democracy into a hollowed-out shell where the few plunder the many, both economically and politically.
I therefore propose that we substitute "income polarization" for "income inequality" in describing the major problem we face. I'd love to hear from those who may have better terms in mind. "Income polarization" describes more accurately the result of the past decades of Republican deregulation and economic irresponsibility, where the middle class has been whittled away and replaced by a mass of people at the bottom and a tiny few at the top. And unlike "income inequality," this phrase makes us less vulnerable to the accusation that we're trying to cut off the tall kids' legs to make everyone the same height. We're just trying to make sure that the tall kids don't run off with everyone else's lunch and leave them with crumbs.