The depressing political calculation that increases the income and wealth gap.
Fifty years ago, average Americans lived in a society where less than $10 of every $100 in personal income went to the nation’s richest 1 percent.
Our top 1 percent are now grabbing just under 20 percent of America’s income, double the 1963 level.
How did this happen? We Americans certainly never voted for this upward redistribution. In all the years since Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, no candidates ever campaigned on a platform that called for enriching America’s already rich.
This doesn’t make sense. Americans, after all, live amid democratic institutions. Why haven’t the American people, through these institutions, been able to undo the public policies that squeeze the bottom 99 percent and lavishly reward the crew at the top?Yet the rich have been enriched. And they keep getting even richer while America’s 99 percent face an economic insecurity that never lets up.
