By Linda Felaco
From time to time, we get commenters who claim that we here
at Progressive Charlestown “hate” the rich. This attitude puzzles me. Surely,
if there was ever a time when the rich of this country disguised their loathing
and contempt for the poor—a big “if” considering the deep Calvinist streak that
connects prosperity to divine election—the gloves have come off during this
election cycle.
Herman Cain proclaimed “If
you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.” Newt Gingrich advocates
firing
school janitors and replacing them with the children of the poor to instill a “work ethic” in them. Though if you’re
wondering how putting poor children’s parents out of work and giving the
children their jobs—for lower pay—betters the lives of families in poverty,
you’re going to have to ask Newt, because I’m baffled.
Multimillionaire
Mitt Romney joked that he was “unemployed” while he was
“earning” more per day than most Americans earn all year and paying a lower tax
rate on those earnings than most Americans do. He also bragged last month that he liked to fire people
at a time when nearly 13 million Americans are out of work. And to top it off, last
week he declared that he was “not
concerned about the very poor”—and managed to come under fire from both the
left and the right, the right decrying his belief in the safety net.
And right here in Charlestown, at the December 12 “Riot
of the Rich,” we were informed in no uncertain terms that there
would be no tax breaks for the lower classes if it meant that Charlestown’s 1%
might have to halt planned additions to their already-lavish homes or {shudder}
rent out a vacant property or two.
Apparently, merely quoting what the rich say about the rest
of us in their “quiet
rooms” makes you a “hater.” Though Bill Maher’s reaction to Mitt Romney’s now-infamous
quiet rooms comment during his January 20 show was similar to mine: “It’s a
wealth gap, not anal warts.” When did we start having a caste system in this
country? I was always led to believe this was a democracy and that I was the
equal of anyone else. Maybe that’s why commenter “Jerry” thinks public
education in this state is such a dismal failure. My teachers clearly did not
prepare me to assume the role of Dalit. Then again, judging from the difficulty some people are having grasping why the Cranston West school prayer violates the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, our schools have failed.
Universal public education was supposed to give everyone an
equal opportunity to better themselves. Except in this country schools are
funded largely through local property taxes, meaning wealthier communities have
better schools. But at least everyone has the opportunity to attend some sort
of school one way or the other, and even if your teachers are underqualified
and overworked, you at least have access to books, assuming you’d managed to
learn to read—and assuming Newt
Gingrich hadn’t grabbed the books out of your hands and shoved a broom at you
instead.
It used to be that if you weren’t a heterosexual white
Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, you could blame your lack of success on the old
inequalities: racism, sexism, homophobia. But progress has been made in
removing many of the more visible of these barriers. So why are so many people
still struggling to get by? Why is social mobility—i.e., “the American dream,”
that your children will be better off than you are—at an all-time low? As Bill
Maher said during his show on January 13, “We’re 10th in the world
in the American dream. It’s like Mexico being 10th in the Mexican
hat dance.”
Except it’s even worse than Bill Maher thinks: A recent study
of the 34 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development found that only Italy and Great Britain have less social mobility than we
do. And in social justice, which includes categories
such as health care, income inequality, preschool education, and child poverty,
we ranked 27th.
You’d think the lower and middle classes would be natural allies
against the upper or owning classes, yet somehow in this country they’re bitter
enemies. This is the land of opportunity, after all; we never had an
aristocracy from which people were automatically excluded by birth, and our
constitution granted us all equality (well, all white male landowners, at any
rate; equality for everyone else came later). Anyone could get rich just by pulling
themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps (which is hard to do if you don’t
even have boots). And if you couldn’t get rich in the states, all you had to do
was light out for the territories and stake yourself a claim.
Of course, that very land grab was a massive campaign of wealth distribution from Native Americans to white settlers, given that land was the main form of wealth in the 19th century.
No one has the slightest wish to take away any privilege or advantage of the rich because they still believe the old rags-to-riches stories, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, and dammit, they want all the perks when they get there. People will shoot the messenger who dares to point out that even if the Horatio Alger myth was true at some point in our history—another big “if”—it sure as hell isn’t true now that the frontier has long since been closed and income inequality is at 1929 levels. Not only are you not going to ever be rich, but under the economic conditions being projected for the foreseeable future, your kids will be lucky to barely hold on to the same standard of living as yours.
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| There's a reason Jay Gould was called a robber baron. |
Simply defining who's rich and who's poor is subject to endless debate. The poor
have been tricked into believing they’re middle class, and the wealthy have
been allowed to hide in the middle class. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in January, nearly a fifth
of families making less than $15,000
and nearly two-fifths of those making more
than $100,000 called themselves middle class.
And for all that the rich like to claim that they earned
their wealth—though it’s not at all clear to me that extracting every last
droplet of wealth from a faltering company and then destroying it is “earning”—the
fact is that the higher you go up the income scale, the smaller the percentage
of your total wealth is earned from work and the larger the percentage is
“earned” by that wealth itself, often (cf. Mitt Romney) by gaming the system so
that most of your earnings are considered “capital gains” and taxed at a far
lower rate than earnings from work.
Oh, but these are the revered “job creators” we’re talking
about! We tax them less so they’ll invest that money in businesses that will
employ us! Except that’s not how it works out in real life. Because those tax
breaks have to be paid for somehow, and the
way they’ve been paid for has been through reduced government investment in
infrastructure and education (i.e., fewer
jobs) and spiraling debt. You don’t make more money by going into debt.
That’s just basic arithmetic.
The rich even manage to turn poverty into a profit center
for themselves. JP Morgan Chase has been
collecting millions of dollars from the federal government to process the
transactions of the debit-type cards that food stamp recipients use to access
their benefits—and to add insult to injury, JP Morgan Chase offshores those
processing jobs to India.
According to the latest income figures, median U.S. income has
fallen to $26,000 a year. That means 50% of all Americans are subsisting on less than that. During his show on
January 20, Bill Maher pointed out that
“The success or failure of [Mitt
Romney’s] campaign will depend on his ability to convince someone making
$26,000 a year that he, Mitt, a rich guy, knows how to make them rich too. And
if you elect him, he’ll tell you the secret. It’s not a political platform so
much as a wealth seminar. This is the same thing that makes guys like Tony
Robbins rich: They have a secret. But the secret turns out to be that they’re
rich because they’re robbing you. And somehow Americans are good with this.”
After all, this has always been the country of the snake-oil
salesman and the get-rich-quick scheme. Get equity or die tryin’.