People can tolerate an awful lot of wealth disparity. In fact, many people harbor fantasies of merely being temporarily embarrassed billionaires just waiting for their ship to come in. However, a cursory reading of history teaches us that when the wealth gap becomes intolerably large, bad things are sure to happen. It might be war, or revolution, or if we are lucky, a Great Depression.
Nick Hanauer, writing in Politico, believes we are fast approaching that tipping point. The danger is far more imminent and dire than global warming.
Three years ago, in these pages, I warned you that the pitchforks were coming. I argued that 30 years of rising and accelerating inequality would inevitably lead to some sort of populist revolt that would disrupt the fantastic lives we elites enjoy. I cautioned that any society which allows itself to become radically and indefensibly unequal eventually faces either an uprising or a police state—or both.
And here we are.
Our new president was swept into power through exactly the kind of populist anger I predicted.
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And don’t console yourself for a minute that in electing a fellow plutocrat, our side won. President Trump isn’t on any side but his own.
Trump, and the GOP legislators (who should know better) are doing nothing to stem the tide. In fact, just the opposite.
After his trickle-down policies—like ripping away heath care from tens of millions of Americans so plutocrats like us can get giant tax cuts, or just enacting giant tax cuts for us, and calling it tax reform—inevitably exacerbate the already extreme inequality that helped sweep him into office, those pitchforks will be angrier than ever.
GOP policies promises to hasten the day of reckoning.
Peter Turchin … and his collaborators use mathematical models to study the rise and fall of societies—an analysis that postulates a new American civil war arriving as soon as 2021 (and in a highly-armed nation already suffering from an epidemic of gun violence, he doesn’t mean “civil war” metaphorically). For the first time in history, polls show that most Democrats and Republicans identify Americans from the opposing party as the biggest threat to our country.
Mr. Hanauer does not waste words, so it is better by far to read his article in its entirety. He blames the rich, himself, included for the current alarming situation.
...over the span of decades, American lawmakers (at the behest of economic elites like us!) have enacted policies that have depressed wages, stoked economic insecurity and exacerbated cultural angst and social dislocation. At the same time, a tiny minority of mostly urban elite (again, us!) have benefitted obscenely from our growing economic, political and legal power.
He names the evil: upwards redistribution of wealth.
...as we few continue to capture the benefits of almost all of our nation’s economic growth via a trillion dollar a year transfer of wealth from wages to profits, millions of American families are sinking out of the middle class.
The rich have reneged on a grand bargain forged in the aftermath of the defeat of fascism and communism.
We plutocrats would continue to be tolerated—even celebrated—as long as broadly rising incomes meant that each new generation of Americans continued to do better than the last. But through the policies we championed in the corridors of power and through the longstanding social norms we violated in the corporate boardroom, we broke our end of that bargain.
The redistribution flow must be reversed if the country is to be saved.
Our country will not get better until our fellow citizens feel better; and they will not feel better until they actually do better. And this is the hard part for many of you: The American people will not do better until they are actually paid more.
And they won’t be paid more until we change the way we manage our economy. This is the stark, simple fact at the heart of our ailing political system. Nothing is going to get better until we enact laws and standards that persuade or oblige every business to pay every worker a fair, dignified and livable wage. Everything else, from Trump on down, is a distraction or a lie.
And all that was just the introduction. Mr. Hanauer devotes the rest of the article to debunking the excuses of the rich one by one, starting with the minimum wage, and going to education, and bringing back old industrial-era jobs (“magical thinking”), and stupid racists.
Once we’ve dismissed with trickle-down nonsense, the way forward becomes clear. I’ll save a detailed policy agenda for another forum, but there’s no getting around the trillion-dollar elephant in the room: the 5 percent of GDP that used to go to wages but now goes to executive pay and record corporate profits. This isn’t money we’re shipping overseas or feeding to robots or burying in holes.
To recap, burn sentences into our grey matter: The American people will not do better until they are actually paid more. Everything else, from Trump on down, is a distraction or a lie.
So, if you are wealthy, and you rightly fear for the future of your country (not to mention your own personal safety), then I ask you to consider the possibility that the best way to defend your own interests is to improve the economic interests of others. Just do that. I think you’ll be surprised by how fast things get better. But you better act quick.
The battle against ACA repeal and replace has forcefully shown that Dems can spontaneously organize, demonstrate, fight hard, and WIN. The question is what actions can Dems take in the current political environment “to improve the economic interests of others?” Especially if we are not one of the rich plutocrats Mr. Hanauer directly addresses. Surely numbers, conviction and passion can compensate for dollars. Waiting for 2018 is risky, and waiting for 2020 may be too late.