LETTER: Wealth inequality growing in the United States

Dear Editor,

This month, two headlines hit the news. Combined, they made a statement about the history and direction of the United States that is interesting.

The first stated that Elon Musk is now the world’s first trillionaire. That is – he has a net worth of over 1,000 BILLION dollars. That translates to $1 billion per week income forever (at least).

The second is that Social Security is projecting a 22% decrease in benefits beginning around 2032 – that is six years from now.

While today these are simply headlines, they do say something about the values Americans hold. It clearly states that it is more important that one man has more wealth than 99.9% of all Americans, than it is for people who have worked all their lives to have some security in their later years.

Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist, recently wrote that wealth inequality in the U.S. is much greater than it was in the Gilded Age of the 1890-2029 period. The Great Depression and World War 2 destroyed much of the earlier period’s wealth and, following the war, inequality was much less than before the war. This lasted until 1980. Inequality has been surging since then. Again, wealth has never been this unequal.

“We can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few or we can have democracy. But we cannot have both,” is a quote from Louis Brandeis, a former Supreme Court justice. We have seen this for ourselves with the Citizen United decision from the Supreme Court which states that corporations are people and that money is speech. The difference is that, unlike corporations, people eventually die and that money doesn’t talk … it swears!

Why did inequality go up so much after 1980? One answer is taxes. Top tax rates that year were 70%. This year they are 37%. They were lowered by Reagan. Lowered more by G.W. Bush. Lowered again by Trump 1 and again by Trump 2. Tax cuts were supposed to “trickle down” to regular people. Instead, they fueled the fire of inequality.

In summary, problems in America are not so much the Left vs. the Right. The problems stem from The Top vs. The Rest. Until the ultra wealthy again pay their fair share to the country as a whole, we will continue to find democracy (and people) starving.

Dr. Paul A. Haupt

Menominee