That is the first line of a paragraph that continues like this
First we were told that in order to save the nation, we had to bail out irresponsible banks and decrepit car companies, and to extend the Bush-era tax cuts. Last week, we were told that the federal government would be shut down without $38.5 billion in cuts that will slash labor, education, transportation, and health programs, as well as State Department diplomacy. Those cuts are only the beginning as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican, wants $6 trillion in cuts over the next decade, plus $4 trillion in tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.
The words are by Derrick Jackson, in his Tuesday morning Boston Globe column, titled Surprise, surprise: rich get richer.
Jackson is a treasure, a superb writer who should be better known. I would have written about this column earlier, but I wanted to remember the firing on Fort Sumter, and use that as a basis of a broader reflection.
You should read the Jackson.
Let me offer a bit more and a few words of my own.
Jackson is writing about we all should already know - how the recovery is greatly benefiting those who already have, clearly at the expense of the rest of us. Inequality is increasing.
Jackson has a remarkable ability to turn a phrase. After telling us statistic after statistic of what has been happening, he puts it simply:
This is nothing less than a moral tragedy. If we had just ended the Bush-era tax cuts and returned to the Clinton years — which were booming ones for the economy — the Treasury said it would get back $3.7 trillion over the next decade. Instead, in a bipartisan disaster, Capitol Hill gave all that away.
nothing less than a moral tragedy - that's right. I already quoted Humphrey today on the moral measure of society. By that standard our society is increasingly becoming a moral failure.
Perhaps another quote, using data from the US Census Bureau, and more:
The United States is the richest nation on earth, yet we rank 97th in family-income equality, according to the CIA Factbook. Our inequality is so profound that we rank behind nations we associate with corruption, poverty, oppression, or collapsed governments — Nigeria, China, India, Ivory Coast, Tunisia, Egypt, Burundi, Nicaragua, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Greece. The most economically equal country in the world is Sweden.
Of course, Sweden has social democracy. It has a higher overall tax rate than do we, by quite a bit, and yet everyone has healthcare, there are almost no homeless, everyone has a guaranteed source of provision for their old age, when no longer able to work.
According to our Central Intelligence Agency, which does a huge amount of international economic analysis, "Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20 percent of households.’’ Anyone here in that top 20%? Even if you are, and technically Leaves on the Current and I qualify, we have not really gained that much, and with my recent salary cuts as a school teacher, whatever we had gained we have now lost, as our costs continue to rise.
Jackson concludes with a brief, 2-sentence paragraph:
For all of those “gains,’’ we are sliding backward with each announcement of CEO pay. The gain for a few has become the great American loss.
One would hope that Democratic leaders would understand all this. Their policies should address this harsh reality.
Are you listening President Obama?