Letter 2 America for April 17, 2015

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Two interesting, diametrically opposed articles about individual wealth were juxtaposed in the Amazon Prime subscribers' internet addition of the Washington Post yesterday.  The first was titled, "Americans are spending $153 billion a year to subsidize low-wage workers," and it was about the fact that millions of full-time, low wage workers in industries like food service, retail and home health care earn so little that they still qualify for food stamps.  Many of them work more than one job, and they still cannot lead decent, independent lives because they can't earn enough money to do so.  On the next page was an article titled, "Lockheed's Marilyn Hewson is the highest-paid female CEO so far this year," and it quantified her compensation for 2014 at $33.7 million.  The two articles together made my head swim with a nest of vitriolic ideas about wealth and politics.

What came to my mind first was relatively trivial: women are no more noble when it comes to money than men are.  If J.P. Morgan-Chase's male CEO, Jamie Dimon, is vile because he earns $20 million or more per year, Lockheed's female CEO, Marilyn Hewson, is just as vile.  Neither of them is capable of spending in any reasonable way what they make yearly even if given a lifetime to do it in, so they are both poster-children...for excess.  Men don't have a corner on that market.

Next was the social injustice of such staggering rates of compensation.  The Hewson article observed that stock holders wouldn't be angry about her outlandish compensation package because the company's stock had risen by 30% in 2014.  That observation suggested to me that the stock market isn't rational, but then investors aren't either.  The money made by the select few trading in the market, which no one realizes comes out of all our pockets because you can't make money out of thin air, should be taxed intensely because it isn't earned in any sense.  The increased price per share of a company's stock is a function more of money not paid out to share holders in dividends and thus held in the company's treasury rather than reinvested in capital developments like plants and equipment, much less in employees both old and new.  The result is that increased prices for their goods exacerbate the trend toward inflated prices for all the things we use without increases in the compensation we earn for making them, but the rich still get richer for producing and contributing nothing to our society.

Then my mind swung toward the broader issue of economic injustice and the fact that the working man and woman haven't seen their levels of prosperity increase in three decades...ever since Ronald Reagan ushered in the era of supply-side economics: an absurd set of ideas in my estimation, but one that even liberals hesitate to argue with these days out of political correctness.  The idea that money people get for doing nothing (capital gains) should be taxed at a lower rate than money earned by actual work is derived from supply-side theory, but it ignores its own ineluctable consequence: that the sloth generated by unearned wealth is encouraged while honest labor is discouraged because it can never result in prosperity in and of itself for the vast majority of working people, including those who work for Hewson and Dimon.  At that point, tangents began creeping into my thinking, like the despicable nature of the resistance of those with great wealth, and the people against whom they abuse their wealth by propagandizing, to universal health care unless everyone, including people who can't do so, pays for his own.  All in all, the simple fact that those two articles appeared on one screen together set me off and my college radicalism bubbled to the surface again in the form of what I think we should do about it, and what the prospects are for doing it.

Hillary Clinton is the candidate who represents the greatest hope for rectifying the social stratification by wealth that we are seeing and have seen over the past thirty years or so.  But while she says things like, she wants the phrase "middle class" to mean something again, she also wants to make that happen by stimulating small business, which does create most of the jobs in our economy, but also most of the inadequately paid jobs.  The great female, liberal hope is just as confused as our current president when it comes to the causes and remedies for our modern economic caste system, and her opposition will be willfully opposed to such remedies.  Marco Rubio wants to decrease Social Security benefits, invoking the conservative canard that doing so can balance the budget, rather than increasing the amount that the rich pay in taxes, which would actually reduce the deficit rather than just seeming to on false pretenses.  It's enough to make one run for office...except for the fact that unless you are rich and run with the rich crowd, you don't have a snowball's chance in hell...or a working man's chance in America either.

Your friend,

Mike

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This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on April 16, 2015 11:06 AM.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on April 16, 2015 11:06 AM.

Letter 2 America for April 14, 2015 was the previous entry in this blog.

Letter 2 America for April 21, 2015 is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

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