Bus driver keep the change

The Marketplace on Route 27 in Franklin. Most of the aging shopping center is vacant.
The New York Times is reporting on an updated study issued by a pair of economists that put into numbers what most of us have felt intuitively — that the few gains that have come from the slow economic rebound we are experiencing have gone to the very small group of people who were doing well before the Great Recession started.
The report

shows that the top 1 percent of earners took more than one-fifth of the country’s total income in 2012, one of the highest levels recorded in the century that the government has collected the relevant data.

The top 10 percent of earners took more than half of all income. That is the highest recorded level ever.

The figures underscore that even after the recession the country remains in a kind of new Gilded Age, with income as concentrated as it was in the years that preceded the Great Depression, if not more so.

And yet, we’re still hearing from politicians like Michael Bloomberg and Chris Christie that it’s the rich who drive America’s economic bus. Even if they are right — and I don’t believe they are — our economy has not been set up to ensure that the rich doing the driving will let the rest of us on the bus.

And, every time someone proposes doing just that — whether it is the extension (forget expansion) of food stamps or a tax hike for the wealthy to pay for preschool for the poor — we’re told we can’t afford it. They are right. We — meaning the 99 percent who the bus passes by — can’t afford it. The 1 percent can, as the above referenced report shows. It’s time for them to pay their fair share.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.
Unknown's avatar

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

One thought on “Bus driver keep the change”

  1. And what few good things we, the 99%, do have, such as Social Security and Medicare, the top 1% are determined to \”reform.\” When the top 1% say reform, they really mean slice, dice, pulverize and destroy and flush down the toilet of history. Billionaire libertarians like the Koch brothers and Pete Peterson have a decades long jihad against Social Security. They have literally spent millions of dollars propagandizing against SS and Medicare and sadly there are many ordinary working class dopes who have fallen for this garbage. SS is not a Ponzi scheme, that's a bald faced lie. SS is not in crisis, another lie. The SS trust fund is not fake, it's not a hoax and it's not made up of fake phony worthless IOUs, all LIES. Tax the damn rich, make them pay their fair share. Gee, it would be nice if the top marginal tax rate was the same as when Eisenhower was president or even Richard Nixon.

    Reply

Leave a reply to Anonymous Cancel reply