The biggest divide in this country is not left versus right. It’s top versus bottom. Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other instead of looking up at them.
– James Talarico
That is one of the signature quotes from stump speeches by James Talarico, Texas Democrat. It made me think hard about how so much in the news is focused so heavily on the left or right. Fox News, right. CNN, left. MAGA, right. Democrats, left. I agree with James on this one and have started looking up at the multi-millionaires and billionaires in the country. Focusing just on the billionaires, whom make up only 990 individuals, their combined net worth is approximately $6.2 trillion. The bottom 50%, approximately 66 million households, have a combined net worth of just around $4.2 trillion. Look at that again, I’m comparing individuals to entire households.
Taking this to a more aggregate level, 80% of the wealth in this country is consolidated in households worth more than $1 million, approximately 22.8 million households. The rest of the households, approximately 108 million households, share the remaining 20% of wealth. Nearly five decades of “Reaganomics”, aka trickle-down economics, have left us with a broken and lopsided economy where legislation has been engineered to make rich people richer at the detriment of those that are not able to fight the rich. It doesn’t work, clearly, unless you’re in a position of power backed by millions or billions of net worth.
These people have us believing that socialism is the evil thing in the world that never worked. They use the former U.S.S.R., China, and Russia as examples, but those aren’t socialist countries, they’re communist run by dictators. It’s not a fair or even logical comparison. Social Security is a socialist program. F.D.I.C. is a socialist program. Medicare/Medicade is a socialist program. Social programs do work, the people in power don’t like them because it puts those in the need column closer to the have column. Our national debt is $40 trillion. Looking at that combined wealth of everyone over $1 million sitting around $148 trillion right now. A one time tax of 30% to those 22.8 million households would equate to around $44 trillion. We could pay off our national debt in one swipe, and have $4 trillion left over to squash the national debt. Starting over with no national debt or deficit…. wow, what a world that would be essentially starting over. It would make the United States the strongest nation on Earth with zero debt to it’s name.
It’s not likely, but one can dream though. We are at a point in our experiment with democracy where radical ideas like that are needed. 80% of the country should have a louder voice than the remaining 20%, but they don’t. Our education system has been eroded for decades causing a generation of children to grow up and enter adulthood less educated than their parents. Our financial system is setup to reward “too big to fail” rather than supported and regulated in a manner where the concept of “too big to fail” is never even a concern. Are the rich so afraid that they would literally crush the rest of the population to amass as much wealth as possible? I hope not.
-GA
Let’s have a constructive discussion. Use your words.