Tag Archives: Economic inequality

See the degree of inequality

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For many of us, the notion of inequality is intolerable. A system that perpetuates poverty is an affront to our faith and belief about what we are called to do in this world. Of course not everybody has the same conviction.

As this video highlights, however, virtually everybody believes the system is inappropriately rigged and should be different. What is striking is how different the actual world is from what we think it is.

This is suffering. This is self-induced, systemic poverty. And it has to change.

The Gilded Age of Media

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When faced with something they find confusing, most journalists give up.  They don’t do the real legwork of engaging the story.  They write the “process story” instead.  You’ve read the kind in which the author doesn’t actually write the story about the intended subject’s work, but how confusing that work is.  They trot out tired tropes about nails and Jello and hammering something when they should be spending a few minutes actually engaging the material.  I’m just saying.

So we’ve now spent the last four weeks hearing from the news media that Occupy Wall Street has this messaging problem and “nobody” can explain what they want.  [Hello!  They actually wrote a document forever ago!] Blah blah.  Some stuff about how they have no goals or direction.  Blah blah.  Then something about what Republican congresspersons say about them.  Blah blah.  Then some personal anecdote revealing the journalist’s secret disdain for anything outside the norm of beltway horserace-jargoned politics.  Totally lazy and inappropriate.

Here’s the problem:

In late 2009, when people started a movement chanting the famous Reagan quote: “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem” while complaining about having that said government collect any taxes at all, but were also (apparently) satisfied with the current tax rates (taxed enough already?), the media fawned all over them and now talk about the consistency of their message.

In late 2011, when people started a movement changing the famous Reagan quote to say: “Wall Street is not the solution to our problems, Wall Street is the problem” while complaining about said Wall Street’s collective dramatic windfall over the last 30 years at the expense of, well, virtually the entire country, suggesting we raise taxes on the top 1% and alter the lax regulated environment, the media got flummoxed and stared at each other totally confused and dumfounded.  What are they talking about?  It sounds like complete gibberish!

Credit: AP Photo/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Curtis Compton

If you don’t have eyes to see the common themes in the above signs, then you can’t see.

Clearly the media has swallowed the blue pill and decided that a message that is anti-government and inconsistent about taxes is clear and concise, while a message that is anti-Wall Street excess and social contract devastation is some massive word jumble.  Clearly, the Tea Party, which began with the fervor of some ideological firebrands that are strongly libertarian was long ago co-opted into long-term conservative think tank arguments.  That the Tea Party is at once referencing both grassroots libertarians and die- hard social conservatives who have been in Washington for two decades should be more confusing to pundits.  And yet that message is taken for granted: it is not only domesticated, it is normal.  Average.  The way of conservative politics these days.

At the same time, the media is loath to examine the very substance of this rhetoric, instead, they would rather spend their time writing the horserace story about which Republican is up in the polls.  If they are forced to cover the #Occupy movement, they’ll just phone in a process story.  I mean, really, who wants to deal with the actual substance of income inequality and corporate greed.  That’s so…quaint.

Welcome to the new Gilded Age.

 

© 2011 Drew Downs.  All rights reserved

Seperate and Unequal: income inequality in the U.S.

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Some have spent the better part of the last thirty years describing the dramatic economic shift toward the greater concentration of wealth in the ultra-wealthy, and the adverse effect this has had on the average American.  Some have even chosen to mock this concern in recent years, suggesting that “redistribution of wealth” is something to mock. As if the wealth wasn’t already being redistributed (what is a tax cut but an act of changing the economic flow?)!

A new release of graphs highlighting that inequality are striking.  Produced by Mother Jones, these graphs not only highlight the problem.  Notice the last one in this description piece that shows the gap between what the economic reality is and what people think it is.  Then what they wish it were.

Now look closely at this one:

If you figure out where you fit in the metrics, you can see how much more money you would be making if the economic principles that governed the decades during and after the Great Depression (1930s-70′s) had not been obliterated in the early 1980s.  Look at it.  Ninety percent of Americans, 90%!!!!, would be making more money today.  That means, that the plain-old wealthy (as opposed to the super rich) would also be making more money!  Let me say that again.  Low income=more money.  Middle income=more money.  High income=more money.  Wealthy=more money.  Ridiculously, disgustingly wealthy=less money.  Unless you are the lucky one out-of-100, you are making less money than you would have so that the 96-99 percentile could make almost $30K more and the 100th percentile could make $600K more per year!

It would be one thing to be coy and call it “trickle up economics,” but a more accurate term might be “geyser economics”.  The rapid, immediate, and dramatic shifting of national wealth to the upper echelon has obvious economic effects:

  1. Less money in their pockets, means greater financial difficulty for the bottom half of the country. Living paycheck-to-paycheck as it is, increases in two particular areas: transportation costs and housing costs: coupled with a decrease in real wages, means half of the country is getting by on less with no relief in sight.
  2. If we value peace and hate conflict, then we should also be concerned with the emotional and psychological effects that the crushing weight of income inequality is having on the majority of Americans that are struggling–most of which were raised struggling through the last 30 years
  3. The current economic crisis is not a crisis at all for the highly educated and wealthy. The top 10% have seen no job loss at all.  The middle has seen quite a bit.  And yet, it is the bottom third and the young that are disproportionately hurt by the last few years.  We aren’t all being effected.
  4. Gen Xers and Millenials only know this widened gap. The redistribution of wealth to the wealthy in the form of an economic geyser had no positive impact on my generation or those after me.  This means that many of us have been raised in a time believing we were the weird ones not living the high life–when that high life was all perception.

It seems to me that we have no hope of dealing with the struggles and evils of our time without taking a moral stand in support of improving the economic conditions of the 95%.  We know the obvious link between poverty and school performance, violence, blight, drug abuse, and all of the cancers of society.  But until we make it a moral imperative to change the system that creates poverty, we only invite it to repeat.  These graphs show that we are not repeating a cycle of poverty, but living within a system that ever more pushes the bottom 80% toward poverty, and all of its associated evils.

Note: I originally posted that 95% lost money.  It was changed to correctly read 90%.