Opportunity

Dear Friends,

When I was growing up, we always talked about our country as the land of opportunity - anything was possible.  It was the era of upward mobility and a strong and growing middle class and what by today's standards was a limited gap between the rich and poor.  My high school and college years were the years of the Great Society and the ground breaking civil rights legislation.  Everybody was to have equal opportunity to achieve whatever they wanted in this wonderful land of opportunity.

So how has that worked out?  Unfortunately, it has not worked out well at all, particularly from a financial point of view unless you happen to be one of the lucky ones to be in the top 1% or even 5%.  If you have been paying the least bit of attention over the last several decades, you know intuitively that the gap between the rich and the poor has been expanding and that the middle class is shrinking and sinking into the poor category.  You also know that the Bush tax cuts have just accelerated the widening of the gap.  Just so you do not have to rely on your intuition, here are some articles that demonstrate all too clearly the problem that our country is facing.

The first article is from the Huffington Post from July 8th entitled "Income Gap between Rich and Poor is Highest in Decades, Data Shows" (here).  The first few paragraphs are reprinted below, but you should read the entire article.

The gap between the wealthiest Americans and middle- and working-class Americans has more than tripled in the past three decades, according to a June 25 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
New data show that the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest parts of the population in 2007 was the highest it's been in 80 years, while the share of income going to the middle one-fifth of Americans shrank to its lowest level ever.
The CBPP report attributes the widening of this gap partly to Bush Administration tax cuts, which primarily benefited the wealthy. Of the $1.7 trillion in tax cuts taxpayers received through 2008, high-income households received by far the largest -- not only in amount but also as a percentage of income -- which shifted the concentration of after-tax income toward the top of the spectrum.
The average household in the top 1 percent earned $1.3 million after taxes in 2007, up $88,800 just from the prior year, while the income of the average middle-income household hovered around $55,300. While the nation's total income has grown sharply since 1979, according to the CBPP report, the wealthiest households have claimed an increasingly large share of the pie.

The second article is from the Business Insider entitled "15 Mind-Blowing Facts about Wealth and Inequality in America" published on April 9th (here).  The article is really a compilation of charts and graphs from various sources that demonstrate the incredible inequalities in the United States and how they are getting much worse.  You should look at all of them, but I am reprinting a few of my favorites below.

This chart shows average income of the top 1% as a multiple of average income of the bottom 90%.  The far left is 1917 and the far right is 2006.  Sorry the chart is hard to read.

The next chart illustrates that the top 1% have over 1/3rd of the wealth in this country while the bottom 50% have 2.5% of the wealth. 

The next chart is for you statistics geeks.  It shows that if you are rich, there is not now and never really was much of a probability that you would become poor.  On the other hand, if you were poor, there use to be a chance that you would become richer, but now there is very little chance.

The next chart show how recent Republican tax cuts have widened the gap between the rich and poor.

The Republicans want to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, and they want to repeal the estate tax.  These tax policies would make the gap increase even faster and would perpetuate the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. 

These charts tell an amazing story of how the land of opportunity for all has become the land of opportunity for the rich only.  No society in history has been able to sustain itself when the disparity between the rich and the poor gets too great.  In this regard we are headed in the wrong direction.  A society with empathy would not permit this kind of disparity any more than it would permit torture.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal