It was Warren Buffet who said that America is involved in a class war, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
The numbers are staggering, as Robert Scheer points out today on Truthdig:
In one of the best studies of this growing gap in income, economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that during Clinton’s tenure in the White House the income of the top 1 percent increased by 10.1 percent per year, while that of the other 99 percent of Americans increased by only 2.4 percent a year. Thanks to President Clinton’s deregulation and the save-the-rich policies of George W. Bush, the situation deteriorated further from 2002 to 2006, a period in which the top 1 percent increased its income 11 percent annually while the rest of Americans had a truly paltry gain of 1 percent per year.
The upshot is that the top 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of the wealth. But few are talking about it.
Instead, we have a debate over how best to cut programs for the middle class and the poor so that we can plug a hole in our budget and not whether to ask the rich to pay. From Scheer, again:
Instead of taxing the superrich on the bonuses dispensed by top corporations such as Exxon, Bank of America, General Electric, Chevron and Boeing, all of which managed to avoid paying any federal corporate taxes last year, the politicians of both parties in Congress are about to accede to the Republican demand that programs that help ordinary folks be cut to pay for the programs that bailed out the banks.
President Barack Obama is blaming political games for the budget stalemate, refusing to accept responsibility for his enabling of the so-called budget hawks. He should have been fighting hard for a real stimulus that could have jump-started the economy and not just a stop-gap designed to avert disaster. And rather than touting his accomplishments at a time when unemployment remains unacceptably high, he should have been pushing hard for aid to states to keep public workers employed while also empowering labor.
The Republicans make no bones about their priorities. They want to slash spending and gut what’s left of the social safety net. And they want to do this even as they find ways to give money to the people who already have it.
And they are likely to win, thanks to the timidity of the Democrats.
Despite the alarming projections of how the House Republican budget would harm the country, it’s the Democrats who have been on the defensive during the budget debate, principally because President Obama has declined to seriously engage in the discussions or outline an alternative narrative on the economy that is distinct from the GOP. Though they hold only one house of Congress, House Republicans act like they’re in control of the entire government, with little pushback from the White House or Senate Democrats. Both parties now endorse the idea that spending cuts are the best cure for our ailing economy, even though there is no evidence that is the case.
Obama has said that he was perceived as too much of a “tax and spend liberal Democrat” in the last election, so his administration has moved to the right as a result—despite the fact that poll after poll shows that the public believes the unemployment rate is a far more pressing problem than the deficit. “The White House, in particular, has effectively surrendered in the war of ideas,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote recently. “It no longer even tries to make the case against sharp spending cuts in the face of high unemployment.” Throughout this budget fight, we’ve been having the wrong economic debate, as my colleague Katrina vanden Heuvel noted this week. Both our political and media class are guilty of focusing obsessively on spending cuts while ignoring the public’s overriding priority: jobs.
But then, the Democrats long ago ceased to represent workers and the middle class. They are beholden to the same money men as the Republicans. The class war is over and the rich have won.
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