I don't think anyone can argue that income and wealth inequality in this country haven't reached an all-time high. Even wingnut mathematicians are hard-pressed when confronted with the evidence that, indeed, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle is disappearing altogether.
So what are we gonna do about it?
Over the years, I've had a lot of wingnuts scream various unpleasant things at me on message boards, in comments to op-eds I've written, and even in person. But the one that seems to come most easily to their fulsome lips is the undying refrain, that universal appeal to please won't someone think of the children (of rich parents). "You liberals just want to punish success," they say to me with no hint that the irony of that utterance could penetrate the dense shield of supply-side faith they've erected around their prefrontal cortex. "You want to pick winners and losers."
Now, of course I don't want to pick winners and losers, and I'm not about to punish success, and in fact, I'm very much against the very notion of imposing an artificial schematic over a natural ebb and flow of fortune through the economy. See, what doesn't seem to have occurred to my less observant country cousins is, it's not that I want the government to do those things, it's that I want them to stop.
The income and wealth inequality we're currently enduring in America isn't the result of natural market forces, and it's certainly not an indication of success. As government has been warped and wielded by increasingly wealthy families and powerful people, Campbell's Law has asserted itself in the positive feedback loop of plutocracy. Tax loopholes, business subsidies, and loose regulations don't serve lower income earners, and they certainly don't help level the playing field. In fact, due to these distorting factors, social mobility, the ability of individuals to move between income cohorts, is about as low today as it's been in the past 70 years.
Teddy Roosevelt argued passionately for a progressive income tax structure as a means to keep capital from accruing to a few powerful families, the economic aristocracy .
No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered-not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective-a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.
It's no stretch to say that Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush believed just the opposite, and acted to accomplish a goal of establishing a powerful oligarchy that could resist any change to the tax code and thereby perpetuate their hold on the United States government forever. Looking at a graph of median incomes over time, an obvious tred emerges that speaks to that claim.
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Perhaps even more revealing, the same information, only divided into cohorts of the top 40 percent and the bottom 60 percent.
Source
This unambiguous shift in income inequality has had a commensurate effect on wealth holdings by quintile, as well. In fact, there's some evidence that the width of the wealth gap is shocking even to self-described conservatives. So, given that I'm no economist, and of course I'm jealous of Paris Hilton's fortunate emergence from the correct vagina, I don't think that instituting a more progressive tax scheme, raising taxes on the rich and eliminating the bevy of targeted loopholes and giveaways, can be called "punishing success." Factoring in the incredible concentration of pain and privation being experienced at the lower end of the income continuum, I would say we would all profit from doing so.
9:27 AM PT: I'd meant to close this diary with a blog entry from a friend of a friend that's stuck with me for several years now, John Scalzi's Being Poor. You should read it all the way through. Twice.