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 that 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%.