The stuffing your countercultural stawman is pretty moldy, Wojtek. This ain't the sixties anymore. Forty years the US was a middle-class society that delivered economic security to a far higher proportion of the citizenry than it does today. There is an element of US society today, the gloating super-rich, that simply did not exist 40 years ago. There is an arrogance in US foreign policy -- a willingness to squander the lives of GI grunts -- that did not exist 40 years ago when the affluent were exposed to the risks of the draft. The US is a much more unstable society in every way than it was 40 years ago. You should pop out of your time warp and visit it sometime.
Consider, e.g.:
July 19, 2006
The Rise of the Super-Rich
By TERESA TRITCH
The gap between rich and poor is unfortunately an old story.
It is the stuff of parables and literature. It is a force in social history and political economy, from electoral campaigns to reform movements and revolutions.
But in the United States today, there’s a new twist to the familiar plot. Income inequality used to be about rich versus poor, but now it’s increasingly a matter of the ultra rich and everyone else. The curious effect of the new divide is an economy that appears to be charging ahead, until you realize that the most of the people in it are being left in the dust. President Bush has yet to acknowledge the true state of affairs, though it’s at the root of his failure to convince Americans that the good times are rolling.
The president’s lack of attention may be misplaced optimism, or it could be political strategy. Acknowledging what’s happening would mean having to rethink his policies, not exactly his strong suit.
But the growing income gap — and the rise of the super-rich — demands attention. It is making America a less fair society, and a less stable one.
I. The Growing Divide
Anyone who has driven through the new neighborhoods filled with “McMansions” that have arisen near most cities, or seen the brisk business that luxury stores are doing, has an anecdotal sense that some Americans are making a lot of money right now.
But there is no need to rely on anecdotal evidence.
Thomas Piketty, of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley recently updated their groundbreaking study on income inequality(pdf), and their findings are striking.
The new figures show that from 2003 to 2004, the latest year for which there is data, the richest Americans pulled far ahead of everyone else. In the space of that one year, real average income for the top 1 percent of households — those making more than $315,000 in 2004 — grew by nearly 17 percent. For the remaining 99 percent, the average gain was less than 3 percent, and that probably makes things look better than they really are, since other data, most notably from the Census Bureau, indicate that the average is bolstered by large gains among the top 20 percent of households. In all, the top 1 percent of households enjoyed 36 percent of all income gains in 2004, on top of an already stunning 30 percent in 2003.
Some of the gains at the top reflect capitalism’s robust reward for the founders of companies like Microsoft, Google and Dell. But most of it is due to the unprecedented largesse being heaped on executives and professionals, in the form of salary, bonuses and stock options. A recent study done for the Business Roundtable(pdf), a lobbying group for chief executives, shows that median executive pay at 350 large public companies was $6.8 million in 2005. According to the Wall Street Journal, that’s 179 times the pay of the average American worker. The study is intended to rebut much higher estimates made by other researchers, but it does little to quell the sense that executive pay is out of whack. As the Journal's Alan Murray pointed out recently, the study’s calculation of executive pay is widely criticized as an understatement because, as a measurement of the median, it is largely unaffected by the eight or nine-digit pay packages that have dominated the headlines of late.
Rich people are also being made richer, recent government data shows, by strong returns on investment income. In 2003, the latest year for which figures are available, the top 1 percent of households owned 57.5 percent of corporate wealth, generally dividends and capital gains, up from 53.4 percent a year earlier.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank, compared the latest data from Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez to comprehensive reports on income trends from the Congressional Budget Office. Every way it sliced the data, it found a striking share of total income concentrated at the top(pdf) of the income ladder as of 2004.
• The top 10 percent of households had 46 percent of the nation’s income, their biggest share in all but two of the last 70 years.
• The top 1 percent of households had 19.5 percent (see graph).
• The top one-tenth of 1 percent of households actually received nearly half of the increased share going to the top 1 percent.
These disparaties seem large, and they are. (Though the latest availabe data is from 2004, there are virtually no signs that the basic trend has changed since then.) The top 1 percent held a bigger share of total income than at any time since 1929, except for 1999 and 2000 during the tech stock bubble. But what makes today's disparities particularly brutal is that unlike the last bull market of the late 1990's — when a proverbial rising tide was lifting all boats — the rich have been the only winners lately. According to an analysis by Goldman Sachs, for most American households — the bottom 60 percent — average income grew by less than 20 percent from 1979 to 2004, with virtually all of those gains occurring from the mid- to late 1990's. Before and since, real incomes for that group have basically flatlined.
The best-off Americans are not only winning by an extraordinary margin right now. They are the only ones who are winning at all. ...
<http://select.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/opinion/19talkingpoints.html?pagewanted=all>
Carl