The Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial board today published a harsh condemnation of the policies which have led to the results first highlighted by the NYT in discussing the work of economic analysts that the top 300,000 wealthiest Americans had an income (in 2005) nearly equal to that of the bottom 150 MILLION AMERICANS.
Here is an excerpt of the editorial, signed by David McNaughton for the editorial board. {All emphases mine, of course.}
Policy drives an unhealthy divide
Nation's wealth concentrated in a few hands; government and business fuel the crisis
Published on: 04/08/07
The wealthiest 300,000 Americans together earned almost as much in 2005 as did all 150 million Americans on the bottom of the income ladder.
That's an extraordinary statistic, first reported by The New York Times.
Even more remarkable, public policy and private practice contribute to the widening — and unhealthy — income gap in the United States.
The current tax code disproportionately permits the well-off to accumulate additional wealth even as 47 million less fortunate Americans go without health insurance because they can't afford coverage.
In the private sector, the gap between pay for top management and wages for ordinary workers has become a chasm. On the one hand, former Chief Executive Robert Nardelli can leave {note: Atlanta-based} Home Depot with a $210 million severance package despite having failed to produce an investment return for shareholders...
Not since the Depression has inequality in income been so pronounced...
...And it's not just the very richest Americans who are leaving their fellow citizens behind. The 10 percent of households at the top of the financial ladder claimed almost 45 percent of national income in the United States in 2005 (up from less than 35 percent two decades ago), according to economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics.
...The average income per household for the other 90 percent slipped $172 in 2005.
...Unavoidable changes in the global economy are certainly responsible in part for the widening income gap. But conscious decisions contribute to the concentration of wealth as well.
Circuit City, for example, fired employees for the sole reason of improving profits by lowering labor costs. "It was no fault" of the workers, a company spokesman told The Times.
...Wages and salaries have been steadily shrinking as a share of national income. Last year, wages and salaries accounted for a smaller slice of national income than in the depths of the Depression, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington-based think tank. Not surprisingly then, corporate profits claimed a record share of national income.
The income gap between the very rich and everyone else would matter less if safety nets were stronger, if public education were a mission instead of an obligation. There, the United States is woefully deficient.
Janet Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, noted last fall that among industrialized nations, the "U.S. ranks above only Mexico, Korea and Ireland in gross public social expenditures as a share of GDP [gross domestic product]."
It's no wonder that many Americans are unprepared by education or job training to rebound when their jobs are eliminated.
The consequence, as Yellen also pointed out, is that the chances "that an American family will see at least a 50 percent drop in its yearly income has more than doubled since the early 1970s, rising to about one in six families in recent years."
Instead of sharing the American dream, those families are stuck with an American nightmare.
It's time policy-makers woke up to the crisis.
— David McNaughton, for the editorial board (dmcnaughton@ajc.com)