Shamefully rich while growing the ranks of the poor
Al’s Loupe
Shamefully rich while growing the ranks of the poor
By Alvaro F. Fernandez
It’s time we faced the truth. Welfare for the rich as tax policy doesn’t work. In fact, the numbers tell us it’s been a total failure.
The class warfare that’s been waged starting with Ronald Reagan, then amped up under Clinton and his dismantling of the welfare state, and finally W. Bush’s steroid-like tax breaks for “the haves and the have more,” as he once referred to his base of voters, needs to stop. Even conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks recently wrote on the subject and concluded that “if we don’t address the problem … the alternative is national suicide.”
Warren Buffet, one of the richest men on the planet, may have said it best when he plainly stated: “There’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Then you have the republican line that says that not allowing the tax cuts for the rich will affect the economy inversely. A tax increase, they claim, will affect job growth and result in greater poverty.
But the numbers don’t bear them out. If that philosophy was true then those poverty numbers should have dropped after George W. Bush moved into The White House in January 2001 and started slashing taxes, especially on the rich.
Some truths
The year 2000 census figures showed that there were 31 million Americans living in poverty. So those numbers dropped, right? Reagan’s trickle down theory worked to perfection with W. Bush at the helm, correct?
In 2012, the estimated number of Americans living in poverty has risen to 46 million. An almost 50% increase.
But that’s not what they told us! What happened?
In simple terms, there are too many politicians who favor the super rich – I suppose because they keep them in power with payoffs known as campaign contributions and other goodies. So over the past few years, and to help those rich friends in need of a few more millions, or even billions, they searched for bounty to plunder.
And alas, they ran into well-stocked, social net programs created since Franklin Delano Roosevelt by progressive-thinking politicians. Programs established to assure that Americans would never again suffer as they did during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
In his book “So Rich So Poor – Why it’s so hard to end poverty in America”, Peter Edelman, a Georgetown University professor and former Assistant Secretary of the Dept. of Health and Human Services under Bill Clinton, who quit the administration for his disagreements about welfare reform, says that the safety net created and improved over the past half century keeps 40 million Americans out of poverty.
He tells us that if some of our politicians are allowed to carry out their austerity philosophy and the chopping, slashing, or stealing from out safety net programs, those numbers could easily reach 86 million Americans living in poverty in very little time. As it is, he says, one of every seven American is currently on food stamps.
Another startling figure is that half of the jobs in this country pay under $34,000 (the poverty line is set at $22,000, a fact of life for a quarter of all Americans) – a salary that has been stagnant since around 1970. During that same period of time, CEOs of large corporations and the very wealthy have become exceedingly richer. Interestingly, they’ve managed to pay less taxes (as a percentage of their income) than persons earning the 34 grand that work to make them wealthier.
This country prides itself on being the greatest on earth. The richest. The strongest – spending billions around the globe on wars and keeping us “safe from terrorism.” Yeah, I remember, it used to be communism…
But imagine a not so distant future with almost 100 million Americans living in poverty. Don’t you think that’s a question of national security?
It seems to me that it’s democracy that’s at risk.
I’ll finish with a quote from Edelman’s book:
“This cannot stand. America and poverty are words that should not appear in the same sentence. We are the wealthiest country in the world; that we should have poverty at all is oxymoronic and that we have the highest child poverty rate in the industrialized world is downright shameful.”
