My political hero is Huey Long, former governor of Louisiana and also a United States Senator, who was assassinated in 1935, when he was on the verge of becoming a strong presidential contender. Long was the last great populist in the U. S. Senate; through his "Share The Wealth" program, he advocated a more equitable distribution of income in this country. It's a simple solution to virtually all our society's ills, but one we are still inexplicably avoiding.
Statistics show that, as of 2004, the richest 20% of Americans possessed about 85% of privately held wealth. http://http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html This means that the vast majority of Americans, the working class and the poor, only own about 15% of the real wealth in this country. That's an absurd situation, and given today's nightmarish economic conditions, one we absolutely have to address. For any true statesmen, the overriding issue of the day ought to be the undeniable fact that the vast majority of workers are not paid enough to meet the ever increasing costs of living. The system is rigged, because all those who have a hand in running the system are in that top 20%, and thus have quite a vested interest in maintaining it. The financial problems that most individuals and families in America face will never be solved until someone with the power to solve them comes from that 80% group. No one in Congress, or in the establishment press, faces these economic difficulties, so they don't feel any need to examine them, let alone take any corrective actions.
This isn't about "class envy" or "class warfare." These are the sobriquets that politicians, business leaders and media talking heads invariably invoke when someone mentions the giant elephant in the room. The reality is that the rich declared class warfare on the rest of us centuries ago, and it's long past time for us to start fighting back. The problem with this issue is that very few people think of themselves as "rich," even when they are by any reasonable measuring standard. The details of any "share the wealth" type initiative could be worked out in reasonable debate between reasonable people. I believe you begin at the top; no one, for instance, needs to be a billionaire. That's just ridiculous. Think of all the good Bill Gates' billions could be doing, for example. Instead, his answer is to continue to rape and pillage consumers by charging for every new software "version." The least he could do at this point is start allowing freeware. Then he could concentrate on getting his crappy products to work better.
The bottom line is no person's life is thousands of times more valuable, let alone millions or even billions, than anyone else's. No one is doing that good a job at anything to warrant the kinds of sinful salaries most CEOs make. Maybe if one brilliant individual came up with a universal cure for cancer, or a universal pill that greatly increased life expectancy, then that individual would be worth all the billions we could give him. However, I just don't see that kind of brilliance, or positive societal impact, from the likes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Sam Walton, etc. Why should upper management of virtually every corporation be paid millions (not to mention huge bonuses, which their underlings never receive), while those whose sweat make those millions possible are struggling to make ends meet, often working two jobs to do so? It isn't a good thing for Americans to be working more than one job. They shouldn't have to. Huey Long talked about us all enjoying our "blessings." In the 1930s, he was advocating a 30 hour work week. I'm sure he must be spinning at wharp speed in his grave over the miserable mess our greedy and incompetent leaders have put us in.
There are many ways to correct the tremendous inequities that decades of greed and corruption have wrought. We can return to a huge (90% or higher) tax rate for the highest incomes. We can give "bonuses," based on need, to the poor and working class. My personal favorite is to institute a new minimum wage, tied to a maximum wage. You could say that the top wage earner in a company couldn't be paid more than 20 times what the lowest wager earner was paid. So, if your company was doing so stunningly well that you could afford to pay the CEO a million dollars, then you'd have pay the janitors and clerical staff $50,000. Since we obliterated our industrial base by outsourcing and building plants in other countries, not to mention lowering the wages at the bottom of the pay scale with immigrant workers, we have to find a way to give all those consumers enough money to afford the bright and shining items in our consumer society. When that 80% of woefully underpaid workers can no longer afford the new cars, computers, high definition t.v.s and cell phones that are such an integral part of our economy now, then things will truly start collapsing.
It's curious how the present system works. If you're a distressed citizen, whose house is being foreclosed on, and whose family is on the verge of breaking up, you must "learn to live within your means," "try harder," or find some other unrealistic method of dealing with your "personal problem." If you're the banking industry, and your bloated profits are down because of some short sighted, unwise loaning practices, you don't "sacrifice" anything. You simply whine to Congress that you need help, and our fearless leaders, even when over 90% of their constituents let them know how strongly they oppose it, write you a blank check so you don't have to pay the least bit of penalty for your failures. The same holds true for the American auto industry. Instead of lowering the prices of their crappy products, which ought to be the first thing they tried when sales were down, they whined and cried to Congress that they needed "help" to save them from their own incompetence. Then they had the nerve to blame the union salaries, instead of their shameful executive pay and bonuses. When one of the unwashed masses fails, he or she must trust in that "rugged individualism" we know and love. When an elitist group of plutocrats sees their enormous profits shrink, they are bailed out courtesy of those same unwashed masses. It's like the drowning man tossing his life preserver to the ones safely in the boat.
Despite every effort to avoid it, this issue will have to eventually be faced. Much like the coming Social Security disaster, our unthinking leaders can only pass things off on future generations for so long. Not too long from now, there will be far more people retired and expecting Social Security payments than there are workers to tax to pay them. Not too long from now, there will not be enough consumers with the ability to purchase the products our economy now depends on, thereby throwing even more companies into crisis and more workers into unemployment. We have to face the fact that either we start paying workers a much higher salary, or we dramatically slash prices across the board. It's that simple.
