The center is not holding
The richest get richer and the poor and middle class fall farther behind...
If you pile up all the money currently held by the U.S. middle class, you’ll see that group now has less wealth than the vaunted top 1% of our economic food chain.
(That 1% includes 1.3 million families whose household income tops $500,000. That 1% does not include me, but this is not sour grapes talking. No one is served by this world-record gap.)
This level of disparity is a first — though it’s not a huge surprise, given the trend measured over time by the Federal Reserve. You can trace how the wealth gap has been growing since 1989 here.
The wealth gap is widening at an alarming rate, and that’s beyond concerning, particularly in how those numbers play out in the lives of people of color. From a 2019 student from the Federal Reserve:
Black and Hispanic families have considerably less wealth than White families. Black families' median and mean wealth is less than 15 percent that of White families, at $24,100 and $142,500, respectively. Hispanic families' median and mean wealth is $36,100 and $165,500, respectively. Other families—a diverse group that includes those identifying as Asian, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, other race, and all respondents reporting more than one racial identification—have lower wealth than White families but higher wealth than Black and Hispanic families.
The answer? Well, one is to tax the rich. Do we have the political will to do that? Jaysus, let’s hope so.
A first step would be to insist on equal educational opportunity for every kid. I literally think it ought to be a constitutional amendment. Every kid deserves a chance. That seems pretty American to me.
If we were able to do that, to make sure that every kid has the chance to learn how to create societal value--then over the next 30 to 40 years Black and Hispanic family incomes would rise to the level of White family income and a whole host of problems like the deficit and crime would disappear.
For about 10 years I was involved in an organization that used a model resembling that of LeBron James' "I Promise" school. It absolutely worked--we (and I say we guardedly because my contributions were minimal) got lots of kids to and through college. Kids who would have never made it otherwise. If we could make programs like these available to underprivileged kids we'd be a long way toward solving the problem. We could totally make that happen without raising taxes. We would just need to eliminate the current method of school district funding and equalize the educational funding for all kids.
Of course a very large percentage of the people on the other side of the political spectrum deeply do not want to solve this problem. They say they do but they really don't. What they really want to do is keep elite White male minority rule in place. We would have to call them on their bullshit, we would have to defeat their deflections (charter schools and the like). But it's doable.
We know how to do this. We know what works. In my mind, insisting on this is our only way out of this mess.
The year I was born, the 200,001st dollar and above of wages were taxed at 91%. We'll never see that again, but the insanely wealthy, like Bezos and Musk, and the merely wealthy being paid over $400,000 per year, don't get paid in taxable wages. We need to tax wealth as well as wages.