I count myself among the dying breed of unabashed liberals who are convinced that the growing gap between rich and poor is tantamount to a metastasizing cancer in the American body politic. Moreover, our diagnosis is that almost all of the economic, political and social maladies ailing this country – from crime and unemployment to political dysfunction, sub-standard education, and illegal immigration – are mere symptoms of this cancer.
This is why we have been so frustrated watching President Obama expend his political capital on treating these symptoms instead of on finding a cure for this cancer.
As it happens, I shared my abiding concerns in this respect in two recent commentaries: “CEO Pay Just Reflection of America’s Economic Apartheid” (November 18, 2013), in which I sounded a clarion call for an angry populism to redress this growing gap; and “Pope Francis Condemns the ‘Cult [and] Idolatry of Money’” (November 27, 2013), in which I hailed the pope for condemning the covetous focus on the rich at the expense of the poor as an abomination against God.
I would like to think it was my November 18 commentary, but it’s far more likely that it was the pope’s condemnation that inspired Obama to finally address the growing gap between rich and poor, which he himself described yesterday (in a speech outlining the agenda for the last three years of his presidency) as “the defining challenge of our time.”
Here, courtesy of whitehouse.gov, is how he echoed my lamentations as he presented his own diagnosis of this cancer:
The top 10 percent no longer takes in one-third of our income; it now takes half. Whereas in the past, the average CEO made about 20 to 30 times the income of the average worker, today’s CEO now makes 273 times more.
And meanwhile, a family in the top 1 percent has a net worth 288 times higher than the typical family, which is a record for this country.
Incidentally, it makes a mockery of the patriotism conservatives are always professing that, while CEOs are taking home an average annual pay of $12 million, service workers (representing 30 million hardworking Americans) are on a nation-wide strike today to force their respective CEOs to increase their pay from $7.25 to $10.10-an-hour. This would earn them a barely livable average annual pay of $20,200, which is still less than half of the $50,000 those CEOs make in one day. Forget political patriotism! This smacks of economic apartheid!
No doubt this is why, like me, Obama cited the pope for the proposition that it is a national disgrace, if not an unpardonable sin, for any country to show more concern about its stock market losing a few points than about its people going hungry and homeless.
I felt unqualified solidarity when Obama admonished that:
The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the globe.
I was even encouraged by his prescription for curing this cancer, which included (in my own words):
- Enacting the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013 ($10.10) to ensure that every full-time worker earns enough to live on without the indignity of having to rely on all kinds of social welfare programs … like food stamps and SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Not to mention that a livable wage would spare the rest of us the tax burden of having to fund these programs. For example:
A staggering number of bank tellers in New York City use public assistance to get by… Thirty-nine percent of NYC-based bank tellers and their families rely on at least one government assistance program, like Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit or food stamps.
(The Huffington Post, December 4, 2013)
Meanwhile, the rich investment bankers our tax dollars bailed out are now making 100 times more in bonuses than these poor bank tellers make in wages….
- Lifting the racist scales from the eyes of poor White folks so that they can see that they have far more in common with poor Black and Brown folks than they do with rich White folks … like former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. For example, if poor Whites voted more according to their economic interests than their racial prejudices, Congress would be comprised of politicians who regard voting for things like healthcare and immigration reform as an article of faith.
- Reordering national priorities to invest more in education and infrastructure than in corporate welfare and military arms.
Conspicuously absent from Obama’s prescription, however, was a treatment I believe is indispensable to curing the growing gap between rich and poor: reforming the tax code.
Apropos of which, it might be helpful to know that, during a December 2, 2013 interview on Charlie Rose, no less a person than conservative hedge fund manager Stan Druckenmiller literally shocked the eponymous host when he conceded that he would have been perfectly happy to pay more in taxes to extend Medicaid coverage to the 40-50 million uninsured Americans.
I agree; not least because this would have spared the country the bureaucratic and technical nightmare implementing Obamacare is turning out to be. And more targeted legislation could have been enacted to redress unfair insurance practices related to issues like pre-existing conditions and annual/lifetime caps on essential benefits.
Of course, comprehensive tax reform would include other measures, like eliminating deductions that favor the rich. But there’s no gainsaying that the most efficient way to reduce the growing gap between rich and poor in America is to reform the tax code to make it more progressive and, consequently, make the nation’s wealth more redistributive.
My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody… I think when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.
(Barak Obama, ABC News, October 14, 2008)
That was the Obama who impressed so many of us in 2008. Let’s hope he finds himself again, before it’s too late.
Related commentaries:
CEO Pay … America’s economic apartheid
Pope Francis condemns…