>"The amount of money it would take to bring all officially poor
>households up to the poverty line is amazingly small: .5% of GDP, or
>just over 3% of the income of the richest fifth of households. It
>would take a bit more money to bring the poor up to a civilized
>standard, but not that much. Doubling the incomes of the poorest 20%
>of households -- from an average of $10,136 (in 2001) to $20,272,
>which is still less than half the median--by taxing the richest 20%
>would require the affluent fifth to sacrifice less than 7% of their
>income, bringing it down from an average of $145,970 to a mere
>135,834. That would reduce their share of the national pie to
>late-1980's levels, hardly a period when the upper orders were
>suffering. But clearly it's much more important that the affluent be
>able to buy Hummers than to accomplish this bleeding-heart goal."
>(p. 111)
>
>Why do I never see stuff like this in radical papers? No one can
>bother to crunch the numbers? Anything short of total revolution is
>useless? What? I found this little calculation shocking and
>illuminating.
Activists to the left of the Democratic Party could make use of the sort of stats that Doug provides in his books, articles, and LBO in electoral and other political campaigns on the national level if we managed to build a mass political party of workers and our allies. We need to make a political context in which information like this can be put to use. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>