I remain completely flummoxed as to how we have bought, for so many years, the idea that the wealthy and big business need subsidies from taxpayers who are largely getting hosed by flat growth and contracting wages.
There has been a conservative idea that we (and we'll come back to the definition of "we") need to get out of the way of business in order to promote growth across the economy. As goes business, they say, so goes the United States of America. However, it is clearer and clearer that the fate of most Americans is not causally connected with the fate of big business. Big business does increasing percentages of selling, operating and manufacturing outside the US, and stores its cash outside the US. Big business is doing splendidly, with profits at record levels, stock values breaking through all-time highs regularly, and executives being paid at large and increasing multiples to the people who work for them.
And still, the vast, vast majority of individuals in the United States are seeing flat-to-declining wages and worse, declining prospects.
And still worse, that vast, vast majority of those very same people who face declining prospects are subsidizing both the businesses and the executives.
Can it be that we are worried that big business and the wealthy will suffer too terribly if American wage-earners fail to subsidize them.
Here's some possibly startling news: the wealthy will always be ok.
Somehow, the notion that big business and the wealthy needed help became the official policy of the US government. Actually, it wasn't "somehow" -- it was what usually drives a sea change in policy, a great emergency, disaster or problem motivates people to look for change and a policy steps into that opportunity.
The disaster was the economic situation of the late 1970's. Inflation out of sight, low growth, and increasing foreign competition for American-originated goods.
The problem came from a confluence of foreign events related to foreign policy, monetary policy, and failures in big business to understand foreign competition and domestic markets.
The answers to these issues came from the blight-wing of this nation, who prescribe the same thing for every situation, who had been wrong for most of our history, who blamed the temporary change on the left, who failed in this case to either address or actually solve the actual problems and who exacerbated the problem for most Americans.
The answer from the blight-wing is always get out of the way of business, lower taxes (on the wealthy), reduce regulation, reduce government expenditures, all in favor of redistribution to those least in need while claiming that benefits will doubtless accrue to the rest of America. The answer included being the market of last resort for everyone else's products, being the mover for efficiency in taking jobs to the lowest bidder, to putting our states into greater competition with each other than the US was willing to undertake with other countries, deregulation of market transportation for reduced costs to business that redistributed money from producers and transporters downstream to sellers who captured the profits and moved them offshore. These answers stagnated and impoverished millions of American workers. Which brings us back around to the definition of "we".
"We" are the American people, for whom our government should work. We are the taxpayers, the educators, the workers, the people who pick up garbage, who provide police and fire service, who defend our country, who care for the sick, who fix our cars, who build our buildings, who make what is left to be made in the USA, who open their shop everyday, who go the office and grind, who create, who invent, who write, who deliver, who dream. We happen also to include the very wealthy, the executive and investor classes, in an extreme minority.
That extreme minority neither needs nor deserves help from the rest of us. The truth is the wealthy will always be ok. The wealthy have connections, they have investors, they have inside tracks to education, careers, investments, and opportunity. The wealthy have no dependence on the rest of us for anything but the extremity of their wealth. The rest of us determine only whether the 5%, 1%, 0.1% or 0.001% will be really well off, rich, filthy rich, extremely rich or completely and obscenely rich. That is what has changed in the last 40 years since the blight-wing ascendancy began. The wealthy do what the wealthy always do -- increase their wealth. It's the way of wealth. They do not look out for anyone or anything that does not act in that interest. Research shows that the wealth is inversely related to altruistic tendencies and directly related to feelings of self-interest. The more one has, the more one feels that is it deserved and that more should be theirs.
The increase in wealth amongst the wealthy has not increased upward mobility or well-being for the rest of us. If the formula from the blight-wing were valid, the rest of us would be swimming in prosperity, yet the reverse is true. Is 40 years not enough time for the experiment to have shown positive outcomes for the theory? How much more upward redistribution is necessary before the really good stuff happens? How much more pollution, how much more impoverishment, how many more jobs lost, how much more denial to our poor, how much more disintegration of our streets, bridges, tunnels, power lines, rail systems, and other infrastructure will it take before we, America, see the benefits of blight-wingedness? When does the cool stuff kick in?
It's clear the policies of the last 40-odd years have failed us, yet liberalism is still a curse word. The right is a blight on America, responsible for reversing the post-1920's upward trend, yet we have not made it clear to the world. The left criticizes characters on the right, but fails still to make the right the scourge that the right has made of the left.
Let me be the one to offer permission. I happen to be in the 1%, so I know how much help I don't need.
Conservatism sucks. It is wrong. It has always been wrong. It has betrayed America and Americans every time it is allowed to set policy. It is a blight.
And by the way, the wealthy will be ok. They will always be ok. They don't need help from the jobless, the underemployed, the debt-ridden graduate, the hungry, the disenfranchised, the worker with limited prospects, the retired, the sick, the family struggling on multiple jobs with capped incomes, the taxpayer with no upward prospects, the small business person, the salary worker seeing a decent retirement retreating over the horizon -- in other words, the rest of America.