Did you notice what Frank Rich noticed in the latest election cycle? The very rich took a drubbing. The worm is turning?
Americans don’t hate rich people. They admire and often idolize success. But Californians took a hearty dislike to Meg Whitman, who sacrificed $143 million of her eBay fortune — not to mention her undocumented former housekeeper — to a gubernatorial race she lost by double digits. Connecticut voters K.O.’d the World Wrestling groin-kicker, Linda McMahon, and West Virginians did likewise to the limestone-and-steel magnate John Raese, the senatorial hopeful who told an interviewer without apparent irony, “I made my money the old-fashioned way — I inherited it.”
There's hard-earned wealth, and then there's the insult of the arrrogant stinkin' rich who have so easily bought power in America. At least Whitman, et al., at least campaigned and worked to get elected.
Their defeat reminded us that despite much recent evidence to the contrary the inmates don’t always end up running the asylum of American politics.
But wait, McMahon and Whitman and Raese aren't the real problem. As Frank Rich points out, they had at least a track record of creating jobs for others, and they actually wanted to serve their country. It's the other kind who worry us most.
The wealthy Americans we should worry about instead are the ones who implicitly won the election — those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names. Unlike Whitman and the other defeated self-financing candidates, they are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There’s no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that’s not nailed down. ...
...It’s the very top earners, not your garden variety, entrepreneurial multimillionaires, who will be by far the biggest beneficiaries if there’s an extension of the expiring Bush-era tax cuts for income over $200,000 a year (for individuals) and $250,000 (for couples). The resurgent G.O.P. has vowed to fight to the end to award this bonanza, but that may hardly be necessary given the timid opposition of President Obama and the lame-duck Democratic Congress.
No, it's not about the lower-income people being jealous of the rich. It's this: wide income disparities within a society tend to destroy that society in the long run. Huge gaps between rich and poor have been infecting and weakening our country for decades. Now we have a society in which self-destruction is built into the political system. Both parties help sustain the super-rich, fearful that if they don't, they won't receive the money they need to stay in power.
Rich cites Hacker and Pierson's analysis* of "the collusion between the political system and the superrich" and notes. The center left and the Democratic party lost each other as far back as Carter.
Their ample empirical evidence, some of which I’m citing here, proves that America’s ever-widening income inequality was not an inevitable by-product of the modern megacorporation, or of globalization, or of the advent of the new tech-driven economy, or of a growing education gap. (Yes, the very rich often have fancy degrees, but so do those in many income levels below them.) Inequality is instead the result of specific policies, including tax policies, championed by Washington Democrats and Republicans alike as they conducted a bidding war for high-rolling donors in election after election.
The book deflates much of the conventional wisdom.Hacker and Pierson date the dawn of the collusion between the political system and the superrich not to the Reagan revolution, but to the preceding Carter presidency and its Democratic Congress. They also write that contrary to the popular perception, America’s superhigh earners are not mostly “superstars and celebrities in the arts, entertainment and sports” or the stars of law, medicine and real estate. They are instead corporate executives and managers — increasingly (and less surprisingly) financial company executives and managers, including those who escaped with outrageous fortunes as their companies imploded during the housing bubble.
There's not much a single president, like Barack Obama, can do to turn this around. But Obama did campaign as much on the issue of fairness as he did on health care.
Many of the countless tasks that need to be addressed to start rebuilding an equitable America are formidable, but surely few, if any, are easier than eliminating a tax break that was destined to expire anyway and that most Americans want to see expire. Two years ago, Obama campaigned on this issue far more strenuously than he did on, say, reforming health care. Now he and what remains of his Congressional caucus are poised to retreat from even this clear-cut battle.
Frank Rich probably has other ideas about how we should respond to treachery and/or weakness on our own side of the political battle. But what seems clear to me is that the Democratic party hasn't served either the center or the left for years -- for decades. I dumped it a decade ago. I think we should all dump it.
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*Jacob S. Hacker (Yale) and Paul Pierson (University of California, Berkeley), “Winner-Take-All Politics.”
