If you talk
a walk around Valencia's historic district you will notice how people used to
live back in the era of aristocracy. However, the opulent palaces of the former
monarchs now serve mostly as museums for the citizens of Spain. Between Spanish
local and state taxes, rates reach 43% for people earning 53,000€ or more
annually. Maintaining a palace with those kind of tax rates would be a bit of a
challenge. One the other side of those high taxes, Spain's socialist policies
over the past 30 years (along with joining the European Union) have raised
living standards for almost all of its citizens. It's not quite the old adage,
“a chicken in every pot but two in none,” but it's something like that.
Middle class
Americans who have been under the delusion that the American conservative
movement has their best interests at heart may finally be coming to their
senses. All it took was an almost complete failure of every tenet conservatives
have been preaching for the past generation. The conservative movement has been
polluting the minds of middle class Americans with myths such as: the private
sector is always more efficient than government, therefore we should privatize
as many functions of the government as we possibly can; government regulation
is bad and hinders industry; taxes suck the lifeblood out of an economy; we
should allow people to amass incredible riches because this just demonstrates how
well capitalism is working; and Ronald Reagan's moronic credo, “Government
isn't the solution, government is the problem.”
Along with
these myths, Republicans have controlled through outright lies, like when they
say that they are more fiscally responsible than Democrats. The pendulum is
about to make an abrupt change in direction and it can't happen too soon. In my
opinion, America's ever-growing income disparity between rich and poor is the
single most disturbing aspect about our culture and the one that presents the
greatest risk to our democracy. It is also a direct result of Republican
policies since Reagan. When I say “rich” I don't mean someone who is
comfortably well off, I am talking about multi-billionaires, or the hyper-rich.
The average income for the top 0.1 percent was $3 million in 2002, that's two
and a half times the $1.2 million, adjusted for inflation, that America's new
aristocracy reported in 1980.
Most middle-class
Americans have seen their incomes actually shrink. All citizens still have the
right to vote but the privileged few have direct access to the corridors of
politics that you and I will never see. An individual voice is considerably
stronger if they have the funds to sell their agenda to lawmakers. Once again
as with wealthy people, influence will always be a product which and be bought,
but America's hyper-rich are seriously distorting our version of democracy—what
should be our prized possession as Americans.
Conservatives
seem to suffer from an acute case of amnesia when it comes to the kind of world
they want to construct. In fact, we have already seen the society they are
planning. It is remarkably similar to the America of 100 years ago, a time
before income taxes, social security, unemployment insurance, worker safety and
environmental laws, and federally insured savings deposits. Do we really want
to return to the Gilded Age? We spent most of the last century literally
fighting in the streets to change our society for the better and now
conservatives want us to return without so much as raising our voices? Do we
really want to return to the way we were in America a century ago or like
modern day Brazil, do we want to continue on our path of ever-increasing income
inequalities? Or do we want to return to the path out country was on before we
were derailed by conservative ideology, a path which was followed by European
social democracies who have continued leveling their societies and providing
for their citizens.
Pick just
about any measurement you want and we are probably trailing most Western
European countries. Don't we as citizens of such a wealthy nation deserve more?
I don't believe for a second that the Republican Party leadership cares at all
about abortion, as this is just a wedge they have used to divide American and to
help them sucker middle and lower income religious people into believing that
they share common ground. People who want to criminalize abortion don't seem to
realize that not too long ago this was the way it was in America and we didn't
like it. As much as you may hate the idea of abortion, only a total fool or an
idiot could believe that criminalizing it again is going to make abortion
disappear. It will only make it much less safe. If anti-abortion activists have
their way, America can expect to return to a country where illegal abortion was
the biggest killer of women of childbearing age. You don't even have to go back
in time, you only have to look to our Latin American neighbors to see how
things will look if we decide to follow their policies concerning a woman's
right to her own reproductive decisions.
It is tragic
that so many middle-class Americans defend the hyper-rich but what these people
don't realize is that the economic pie is only so big. If one percent of the
population is taking home 20% of national income, a lot of people are going to
come up short on payday. People say that we shouldn't use our tax policies to
redistribute income. I couldn't disagree more. We did it before when we first
instituted the national income tax system and it immediately brought about a
cataclysmic drop in the living standards of the hyper-rich at that time.
A lot of
mansions on Long Island and in Providence had to close their doors because it
just got too expensive to be stinking rich. Reagan lowered the top tax bracket
for the wealthy and since then the mansions have returned with a vengeance.
This new breed of hyper-rich make the old families look like squatters. We have
baseball players making $25 million a year. Does that sound like how a healthy
society should allocate its resources? How about a CEO who makes $20 million a
year in a company that loses money for its share holders? Why have CEO salaries
in America gone completely through the roof? Where in 1980 CEO salaries were
about 42 times those of their workers, they have risen exponentially to 364 in
2006.
In 2007, the
CEO of a Standard & Poor’s 500 company received, on average, $14.2 million
in total compensation, according to preliminary numbers from The Corporate
Library, a corporate governance research firm. The median compensation package
received was $8.8 million.*
I can't imagine how these bloated
salaries for top corporate officers are not watering down the value of the
companies' stocks. And we wonder why corporate America is in such bad trouble. I
think that the increasing disparity in the incomes of Americans since Reagan's
“revolution” is harmful to our country for many reasons. It has damaged our
reputation as being a society relatively free of class division. When I was
growing up there weren't really any rich people in my town. There were some who
had more than others but kids all went to the same public high school (besides
the few who attended the shitty Catholic high). Universal public education is
probably the single most important idea that has defined everything good about
our country. That idea is in serious jeopardy when many wealthy families are
abandoning public education.
There have always been private schools for a few
select rich families but that trend has been growing rapidly. College education
is becoming alarmingly expensive and is more and more becoming the domain of
the rich. If we are looking for places to spend vast amounts of taxpayers'
money, I can't think of a better place to start than revitalizing our public
school system and making college more affordable to low-income Americans. I
think that this war in Iraq has shown that we have the resources to pay for any
sort of foolishness imaginable, so to say to citizens that we can't afford
necessary things like education and health care is ludicrous.
We are the richest nation on earth
yet we have been told that supporting education or providing national health
care is out of our reach. These are pipe dreams; most European countries
provide great health care to their citizens as well as providing free education
to the university level. Of course, we can afford it; it's simply a matter of
choice. It's like someone telling me they can't afford to go on vacation yet
they drive around in an expensive new car. They could afford a vacation but
they made another choice. America's choice seems to be fighting two pointless
wars at the same time. America is either a country of equal opportunity for all
or it isn't. A good way to ensure that we have equal opportunity is to provide
excellent public education to everyone.
*Trends in CEO Pay AFL-CIO
1)Once at 90%, the top marginal tax rate was lowered to 50% in 1982 and
eventually to 28% in 1988. However, in the intervening years Congress
subsequently increased the top marginal tax rate to 35% (the top marginal tax
rate as of 2007).
