Income inequality problem must be addressed
It’s still early in the political year — yea, early — but one thing seems certain: after the final votes are counted in November and a new president sworn into office in January, the country will demand that something real be done to reverse the decades-long trend of stagnant middle-income wages and the shameful chasm that separates average Americans and the very wealthy.
Otherwise, there will be hell to pay.
Voters on both sides of the political divide have put up with too much baloney already in 2016. They will demand action in 2017 to get a handle on this problem. And they will view with unmitigated disgust inaction by the parties, by Congress, and by the new president.
As Bette Davis once famously said, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be bumpy night” if changes don’t begin to take shape.
It’s 1968 all over again, and the country wants out of Vietnam. When we didn’t, not immediately anyway, we went on a bender. Let’s not repeat ourselves.
In one sense, this has the feel of a made-up crisis. After all, we are no longer in the valley of the Great Recession. Since 2008-09, the U.S. economy has added as many as 13 million jobs and the unemployment has been cut in half, to less than five percent.
As President Obama has said, “Americans are working.”
Still in all, there is the stubborn fact that wages for average wage-earners have remained flat for nearly a decade, following years during which wage growth was anemic.
In the meantime, the incomes of the already rich and the newly rich, along with their share of national wealth, continues to grow far out of proportion to the rest of the country.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, wealth — meaning all financial assets — is even more concentrated than income — the flow of dollars into a household throughout the year.
An analysis by the Center for Budget And Policy Priorities shows that 10 percent of U.S. households owns 75 percent of the nation’s total wealth.
The remaining 25 percent of incomes, real estate and other goodies belongs to the bottom 90 percent, known colloquially as the rest of us.
The “loss of shared prosperity” began in the 1970s. From the end of World War II through the 1960s, we did a pretty good job of keeping pace with one another.
Sure, some Americans were vastly more prosperous than others, but that was OK. The middle class, bolstered by union membership that lifted the wages of even non-union workers, was growing.
“Beginning in the 1970s, income disparity began to widen,” the Center says, “with income going up much faster at the top of the ladder than in the middle or bottom.”
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the wage gap among men has grown in 29 of the last 42 years. It shrank just 13 times.
Today, we are in a real pickle. Things haven’t been this out of whack since the 1920s, and you know — or at least you should know — what followed that wild and crazy decade: the piper came due in the form of the greatest economic disaster in our history.
In our consumer-driven economy, we need people with enough loose change in their pockets to buy, buy, and buy some more.
This is both an economic and a political crisis. The challenge facing the parties and the politicians is to how to engineer a return to shared prosperity.
Strong parties and successful politicians fest on these kinds of challenges. There was no guarantee in 1933 that Franklin Roosevelt would banish fear and steer the country out of the Great Depression.
But he did; in the process, FDR fashioned a political juggernaut that dominated elections — local, state and national — for the next 30 plus years.
In the early days of the New Deal, his party had overwhelming control of Congress. It helped, too, that people were scared. The result was that Roosevelt swung into action.
The likelihood is that the president inaugurated in January 2017 will stare down Pennsylvania Avenue at a Congress that is not only divided, but is composed of individual congressmen either unable or unwilling to reconcile their differences; in short, at a Congress that no longer legislates.
We need a Congress that will rise above principle, because we desperately need a government that works.
It’s no longer a laughing matter that public approval of Congress hovers in the single digits. Those polling numbers are the tip of a spear pointed at the political system’s solar plexus.
Peculiar thing, you don’t hear Republicans chastise Democrats any longer for pitting one class against the other. In the current environment, politicians of both parties are “playing the class card” (with the possible exception of Ohio Gov. John Kasich).
That’s how perilous the current moment is.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.