Rebuttal: Income Equality: Figuring It Out

Dear Editor,

Mr. Cooper’s specious arguments [Income Equality: Figuring It Out / Issue #46] deserve a rebuttal. He says “The fact is, however– except maybe in Sherwood Forest– taking from the rich and giving to the poor is not going to have much impact on the problem of income inequality. What would make an impact is somehow helping the dropout in the fast food restaurant simply “figure it out.” I have lived for a number of years and I have concluded that “figuring it out” is what life is all about. How hard is it for young people to figure out that they will do much better in life if they at least finish high school and don’t start having babies in their teens? Those who can figure it out up to that point should also be able to figure out how to go to college or trade school. Granted, it’s easier to figure it out if you have parents and/or others to coach and encourage you.”

What a pile of crap. His comparison, of efforts to ensure that all working Americans can afford to live on what they earn, to “Sherwood Forest,” does a disservice to both Robin Hood and current advocates for higher pay. Requiring employers to pay their employees a fair level of compensation is neither “taking from the rich”, nor “giving” something to the poor.

What Mr. Cooper conveniently ignores is that since the 1960s, there has been a concerted and relatively successful effort, by the wealthiest among us, to shift revenues from the people who work to produce and sell their products and services, to the people who own the stock in the companies that profit from those sales. As a result of that effort, the median wage for working white males has been almost flat since 1970, while the income of the top few percent has skyrocketed. Since 2009, America has continued with high unemployment and low wages for those who have jobs, while the stock market has doubled in value. That is a formula for disaster.

This decline began in the 1960s with union-busting strategies like “right to work” laws in many states and continued into the 1970s with state and federal laws that eliminated usury restrictions, into the 1980s with huge reductions in the tax rates for the wealthy while making only minimal reductions in the taxes for the average working person. (By the way, today’s huge national debt traces directly to these very large tax cuts for the rich which were combined with massive federal spending. The national debt increased in 12 years, from $936 Billion when Ronald Reagan took office to $4 Trillion when Bush 41 left office, which is an increase in the national debt of 328 percent. That spending basically amounted to the federal government contracting its functions out to influential large corporations (political donors) whose profits increased enormously.) These policy changes, driven by the “conservative” movement, continued into the 1990s, with the establishment of various “free trade” agreements, which allowed American companies to outsource their production to countries with low wages and no safety, environmental or labor protections for their employees. The immediate result of that change was to reduce their production costs, increase their corporate profits, and put millions of American workers out of a job. Also in the 1990s was the elimination of the Glass-Stegall restrictions that had been in place since the Great Depression of the 1930s, which prohibited banks from speculating with their customers’ deposits. That change and the proliferation of sub-prime NINJA loans (No Income, No Job, No Assets) led directly to the collapse of the banking sector at the end of the Bush 43 administration, which Republicans since then have tried to blame on the guy who came into office while the economy was heading into the ditch. No intelligent American should buy into those accusations.

I am tired of hearing people twist the facts, like Mr. Cooper, in order to further their greedy agenda. Our American system of capitalism is a great system, and it is understandable that the wealthy attempt to game the system for their own advantage. If, however, we want all of America to succeed, rather than just an elite few, we have to recognize what is happening and insist that even those people who lack their own lobbyists in Washington, DC should get a fair shake, and a fair day’s pay for their work. It is too easy to forget that a prosperous nation is one where everyone is doing well, and that when that happens, the rich do better than they do when there is less money flowing in the overall economy. Ultimately, policies that concentrate virtually all the wealth in the hands of a small minority is destructive to the wealthy as well.

The people who don’t “figure it out” are those whose lives are so different from Mr. Cooper’s that he can’t relate to them. They often lack the role models to teach them how to “figure it out” and are often working so desperately hard just to exist that they don’t have either the time or energy to devote any effort to “figuring it out.” We fail our students in the second grade, when we fail to ensure that they can read, write and do math. Their parents are too busy just trying to scrape by to help them with their lessons, even if they had the ability. What those who don’t “figure it out” need as adults is fair pay, and without that, they will never “figure it out.” Here is a useful factoid. In New Zealand, that little island nation on the other side of the world, the minimum wage is $13.75. Commodities there are not significantly more expensive than they are here, but they don’t have the problems we see in our own society, because their people can support themselves and aren’t dependent on government subsidies. (Another aside: the biggest government subsidies in America go to huge and influential corporations, but that’s another discussion.)

Do we really want a society where we have a small number of very rich people living in palaces in guarded compounds behind their broken-glass covered walls, and the rest living in barrios or shanty-towns outside the walls? There are plenty of examples of that in this hemisphere and those conditions motivate many persons to emigrate from those nations to the US, either legally or illegally. That, a more highly polarized society, is the direction we are heading, and in a competitive, high-tech world, it is a direction we should not want to go, because it would mean the US would become a second-class nation and lose its position as the model for other nations in the world.

Michael Chenoweth

Key Largo