THE ONE PERCENTERS

You have heard the Republicans complain about "confiscatory" taxes. Their complaint is that their clients-- the just plain wealthy, the super-wealthy, and the true oligarchs--do not want their “hard won” profits to be confiscated by the government. The awful truth is: it’s the other way around---the oligarchs are confiscating the nation’s wealth.

According to G Wiliam Domhoff ( Univ California) in “Wealth Income, and Power, (9-2009 updated 1-2011) “wealth in the US is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands”. That fact probably comes as a shock to most of you (readers). Based on a recent study, most Americans from every walk of life and political persuasion have no idea just how unevenly wealth is distributed in this nation (Demhoff quotes a study by Norton & Ariely, 2010) But who would believe that the top 20% of the population controls more than 90% of the nation’s liquid assets?

First a few definitions. Wealth is defined by Demhoff and other sociologists as what we would call “net worth”, the value of everything a person or family owns, minus its debts. The figures that most economists use to calculate this value are “marketable assets” such as homes, land, commercial properties, stocks and bonds—all those items that are readily convertible into cash, but not cars and household items, which are valuable to people for personal use but difficult to convert into ready cash for investment. Financial wealth is defined as “non-home-wealth” or a person’s or family’s net-worth, minus the family’s “home value” (net worth-minus net-equity in owner–occupied housing). This latter term is a better measure of a person’s or family’s “liquid” assets which may be available for consumption or investment.

According to Demhoff, net-wealth in the USA is highly concentrated in just a few hands. As of 2007, according to figures compiled by our government, the top 1% of households (people with incomes of a 500,000 to a million dollars or more annually--and referred to here as "one-percenters" owned nearly 35% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (managerial, professional, and small business owners) held 51%. That means that the top 20% of the nation’s families owned (35+51) more than 85% of all the private wealth in the nation, leaving less than 15% to be distributed by the bottom 80% (the wage and salary workers)! If we examine the "financial wealth" of the top group, the picture becomes even more skewed toward the higher income level, since ownership of a private home is such a large portion of middle class American wealth. Thus in a measure termed “financial wealth” (defined as net wealth minus home value) a clearer understanding of the liquid assets of the top 1% may be visualized. In that analysis, the top 1% of households held 43% of the nation’s financial wealth, the next 19% held 50%, and the workers and salaried people held only 7%. Thus in terms of “financial wealth” the top 20% of the population hold 93% of all liquid or disposable privately held wealth.

So when you hear the term “confiscatory” taxes, or of certain classes of people unwilling to pay their fair share…review these figures for a better understanding of what they want. It seems to me they have most of the "pie" now. Apparently what they appear to be seeking is to have it all!

Keep in mind that the top 1% (of wage-earners and simply wealthy) have in the last several decades cornered the vast majority of the nation's income. Considering the disparity in wealth, is it any wonder that these same individuals wield a much greater share of political power? Since money can buy control of the media as well as the government, the one-percenters not only have the raw power that wealth brings, but also control of the "story". With such breadth of control they are able to control public opinion and by means of paid lobbyists, mold legislation to their own needs.

Since the “one-percenters” (who have enough money to provide more than adequately for all their own and their family's requirements) they have no need for government supported basic health care, or public transit, or good roads, or good schools or the basic infrastructure which is a requisite for a well-run functioning society and for a decent life for the vast majority of Americans. The one-percenters' agenda is to limit government expenditures for these services. They seek to decrease taxes and government spending on basic infrastructure, since such outlays would only increase their taxes for services which they perceive they do not need or use. Furthermore, since they (and their children) are highly unlikely to serve in the military where they might be placed in harms way--they see military intervention in quite a different light than the rest of us. And perhaps more importantly, they envision financial gain in the hideous concept of endless war-and so they tend to favor military solutions to all our foreign problems great and small. Furthermore, government funds that are allocated to "defence" are unavailable for domestic infrastructure development--in effect this "starving of the governemnt coffers" serves to limit spending in the areas that the one-percenters see as of no utility to their goals. On the other hand, war and military spending is a fine make-work and jobs-programs for the elite, super-wealthy. These defence expenditures serve the one-percenters by moving vast sums into military projects where they can generate enormous profits from government contracts. One has only to recall the intensity and single mindedness with which Bush and Cheney promoted their Iraq war which was planned as and turned out to be a giant giveaway for the one-percenter crowd.

Thus the “one percenters” have taken control of our nation's media and government and turned it into a system which serves them and only them. They have helped to mold us into a nation of low taxes for the ultra wealthy, a hog-tied ineffective government which can not support the basic infrastructure or needs of its citizens, but which supports a bloated, make-work program for the military-industrial complex which their heirlings continue to categorize as our “defence budget”.

So my dear citizen-friends every time you make an expenditure that might have better been provided by a more just and equitable government, the difference you must lay out is the amount that the one-percenters and their facilitators have purloined and allocated to themselves. When you must pay your physician for a larger and larger “co-pay” for health services, or your kids are ill-served or struggling in poorly funded and staffed schools (and you must fork over cash for a tutor or a private school), or you lose a tire to a pot-holed and unreparied road, or you have no basic rapid transit system to get to your job when gas prices go sky high, or perhaps your job has been "off-shored" and you have no job. In those times think of the “one-percenters” who have more than their share of wealth and income, but pay less than their share of taxes—or often no taxes. Think of them each time you put your hand in your pocket to make-up the difference from what a just government should have provided you and what our one-percenter dominated government presently provides and remember that you must pay because they are not paying. In fact, because money is fungible…the money you pull from your pocket goes in effect directly into their pockets. The one-percenters do not spend their money to increase jobs here. They spend it perhaps on a ten-thousand acre ranch in Brazil, or a fifteen-room penthouse in Manhattan, or a second Lear jet, or a trip to some far-off vacation paradise--but not on infrastructure in this USA of ours. The one-percenters are parasites that must be made to pay their fair share. If you finally get the picture perhaps you will get mad enough to do something about it.

Get the picture?