TOPIC Occupy Wall Street
Friday, Nov 11, 2011 12:00 PM UTC
Why income inequality suddenly matters
A ballooning wealth gap coupled with decreased class mobility has brought America to its senses
By David Sirota
A few weeks ago, as the Occupy Wall Street protests were first spreading, something amazing happened: For 10 whole seconds, the local reporter on my TV screen actually talked about the realities of the recession. He even uttered the phrase “economic inequality.”
Image from Slate online item
My guess is that you’ve seen something similar on your local affiliate — and that’s no minor event. When even the most local of television journalists are compelled to acknowledge this crushing emergency in a country whose media aggressively promotes American dream agitprop, it means the Occupy protesters have scored a monumental victory. You can almost imagine a Wall Street CEO turning to an aide and muttering a slightly altered riff off LBJ: “If we’ve lost Ron Burgundy, we’ve lost Middle America.”
In response to this stunning turn of events, conservative politicians are retreating to non sequiturs. They seem to think that if they shout the phrase “class warfare” enough, the nation will go back to not caring about the divide between the rich and poor.
But something has changed.
For most of the post-World War II era, we tolerated relatively high inequality because we envisioned it as a necessary side effect of an exceptional economy that (supposedly) guaranteed opportunities for advancement. As the Wall Street Journal put it, we believed that “it is OK to have ever-greater differences between rich and poor … as long as (our) children have a good chance of grasping the brass ring.”
However, the last three decades have invalidated our standing hypothesis.
Again, here, to read the remainder of the Slate item.
In summary: Sirota's analysis is that the income inequality has been so severe and consistent that it has greatly lessened upward mobility opportunity in the nation, (which in all honesty, never was as great as rumored in press and in propaganda from the academies). He concludes by noting a Fed report arguing that the nation might most easily use the tax code to better level the playing field, should the nation embrace that as a new and contrary goal to the status quo increasing inequality and stagnation; Sirota concluding:
The good news is that if we return to the slightly higher tax rates of the Reagan or Clinton eras — i.e., the rates that existed when the economy was doing better — we can begin fixing things. If, though, we keep tax rates the same or make them even more regressive, we’ll be seeing a whole lot more about economic inequality on our local news as the current crisis inevitably reaches an ugly boiling point.
At a guess, Wall Street feels some pressure, dismissively; and is hardly in agreement with inevitability as Sirota sees it. A progressive hope is that Sirota is correct, and although the interim will not be easy, the goal would be an ultimate reform of the trending unfairness, that we will reverse it, and prosperity and basic decency will trump "conservative" neo-feudalism trending in our national and global future.