Rich and Poor
The increasing gap between rich and poor is leading us to destruction
The music blared from a loudspeaker as a man in a sweat clothes vigorously bowed his electrified violin. Behind him was a handwritten sign: “need money for diapers and food for my children.”
What a country. How did we become like this? When I grew up, seeing beggars was a rarity. Most people had jobs, a home that they owned. But today there are somewhere around 700,000 homeless persons in the U.S. Who knows for sure; there may be more.
In those days, a billionaire was even more rare than a beggar. A few oil barons perhaps but nothing like today. There are currently an estimated 815 billionaires in the U.S. with Elon Musk’s $251 billion in assets topping the list; Donald Trump with a paltry $4 plus billion ranks at number 319 of the richest Americans. In a world where money is power, it shows the significance of Musk’s support for Trump.
Of the 400 richest Americans, according to Forbes, all possess at least $3 billion.
Imagine if the Department of Health and Human Services estimated how much it would cost to build shelters and give free room and expenses for a year to those 700,000. Divide that sum by 400 and ask these billionaires to contribute their share to fund these people’s needs and take them off the streets. How many billionaires would agree to do it? It would be such a wonderful gesture. Is that too much to ask? The man playing the music is begging for money just for diapers. What kind of country have we become if we can’t help such desperate persons?
People originally came to this country to escape poverty, to escape a feudal system of kings and aristocrats who tyrannized them, but centuries later what has been the result: a country whose wealthy continually complain about their taxes, many of whom inherited their wealth and have used it for selfish reasons like the sexual predator Donald Trump.
Now we have a government that essentially is government by bribery with Supreme Court Decisions like Citizens United that allow organizations called Political Action Committees (PACs) to donate unlimited amounts of money to the political candidates of their choice. This system of political donations totally circumvents the one vote input of citizens in their say of what our government does and their choice of persons who will operate it.
In the early 1950s, anyone whose annual income was more than $300K (approximately $4 million today)[1] was paying a tax rate of 92 percent, yes, you heard that right. Not only have individual tax rates declined but also the corporate tax rate, which was 52 percent in the 1950s and is now 21 percent.[2] This decline began gradually with the personal income tax rate stabilizing at about 70 percent up through the 1970s. The downward spiral increased significantly, however, when Reagan became President and championed the “trickle down theory” of economic management. This theory suggests that if those at the top become richer, they will share it with those below them and that their wealth will “trickle down.” Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out that way.
Today, the income tax rate is 37 percent for those in the highest tax bracket earning more than $600K (about $50K in 1951). This does not factor in the manipulations of accountants who can reduce tax liability to the bare minimum, so that the refrain of real estate tycoon, Warren Buffett, that he pays less taxes than his secretary has become a cliché.
There are not only more billionaires now, but they also have even more money and less financial obligations to the government, giving them more to spend on such luxury items as yachts, whose ownership has become a modern-day status symbol. Hardly comforting for the many homeless struggling to survive. Maybe the rich should build some yachts to give them temporary shelter—they certainly can afford it.
The distance between the rich and the not so rich in the U.S. also has increased because of the disproportionate increase in income between the high wage earners and those who take home the average pay check, which has widened considerably since the 1970s.
For example, from 1978 to 2021, CEO pay grew by 1,460%, far greater than others in the top 0.1% of earners which grew by 385% during that period. This is in contrast to the average pay of the typical worker that grew only by 18.1%.
Many statistical studies show similar data of the widening between the decreasing number of have and the increasing number of have nots—but it all comes down to the old cliché: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It’s how our economic system works, a system based on maximizing profit. In fact, the three richest persons in the U.S. have at least as much wealth as bottom 50 percent of all Americans.
This was a statement that Bernie Sanders continually made during his Presidential campaigns. In fact that was based on number computed in 2016 when the three richest Americans were Bill Gates of Microsoft with $89 billion, Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $81.5 billion and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway with $78 billion. Their total wealth of $248.5 billion was higher than the wealth of the bottom 160 million Americans, at $245 billion.
Today the three richest are Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos with $201 billion, and Facebook’s Mark Zukerberg with $184 billion, whose total amounts to a colossal $636 billion which is more than twice the figure of the three richest just eight years ago! The result is an ever increasing divergence between the uber wealthy and those at the bottom of the totem pole, threatening more and more with economic catastrophe, resulting in increasing homelessness.
This is not merely an American problem but a global one as the divergence between rich and poor internationally also has widened.
It’s a sad, sad world and mad in more ways than one. What can we do about it? In the days before the Civil War, there were 40,000 homeless fugitive slaves. People gave them food and shelter and helped them get to Canada where they could settle in a number of fugitive slave communities and missions. I wonder how many of us today would give a night’s rest and a meal to a homeless person? Think about that.
Instead, we have a Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who vows to deport the migrants, who have no home or country. He denigrates the poor and those who don’t have it as good. Few have had it so good as him, yet he wants more and more, and constantly begs for donations. I wonder what he would say about that man with the violin begging for money for diapers. It’s a cruel world out there.
[2] Tax rates and actual tax liabilities are subject to a multitude of factors that because of the various “loopholes” can result in the taxpayer owing little-to-no tax.