{"id":114183,"date":"2014-04-23T13:30:21","date_gmt":"2014-04-23T13:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=114183"},"modified":"2014-04-23T13:30:21","modified_gmt":"2014-04-23T13:30:21","slug":"government-protection-racket-1-percent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/government-protection-racket-1-percent\/","title":{"rendered":"Government = Protection Racket for the 1 Percent"},"content":{"rendered":"

The evidence of income inequality just keeps mounting.\u00a0According to \u201cWorking for the Few<\/a>,\u201d a recent briefing paper from Oxfam, \u201cIn the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our now infamous one percent own more than 35 percent of the nation\u2019s wealth. Meanwhile, the bottom 40 percent of the country is in debt. Just this past Tuesday, the 15th of April \u2013 Tax Day \u2013 the AFL-CIO reported that last year the\u00a0chief executive officers of 350 top American corporations were paid 331 times more money<\/a>\u00a0than the average US worker. Those executives made an average of $11.7 million dollars compared to the average worker who earned $35,239 dollars.<\/p>\n

As that analysis circulated on Tax Day, the economic analyst\u00a0Robert Reich reminded us<\/a>\u00a0that in addition to getting the largest percent of total national income in nearly a century, many in the one percent are paying a lower federal tax rate than a lot of people in the middle class.\u00a0You may remember that an obliging Congress, of both parties, allows high rollers of finance the privilege of \u201ccarried interest,\u201d a tax rate below that of their secretaries and clerks.<\/p>\n

And at state and local levels, while the poorest\u00a0fifth\u00a0of Americans pay an average tax rate of over 11 percent, the richest one percent of the country pay \u2013 are you ready for this? \u2013 half that rate.\u00a0Now, neither Nature nor Nature\u2019s God drew up our tax codes; that\u2019s the work of legislators \u2013 politicians \u2013 and it\u2019s one way they have, as Chief Justice John Roberts might put it, of expressing gratitude to their donors: \u201cOh, Mr. Adelson, we so appreciate your generosity that we cut your estate taxes so you can give $8 billion as a tax-free payment to your heirs, even though down the road the public will have to put up $2.8 billion to compensate for the loss in tax revenue.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of which makes truly repugnant the argument, heard so often from courtiers of the rich, that inequality doesn\u2019t matter. Of course it matters.\u00a0Inequality is what has turned Washington into a protection racket for the one percent.\u00a0It buys all those goodies from government: Tax breaks. Tax havens (which allow corporations and the rich to park their money in a no-tax zone).\u00a0Loopholes. Favors like carried interest. And so on. As Paul Krugman writes in\u00a0his\u00a0New York Review of Books\u00a0essay<\/a>\u00a0on Thomas Piketty\u2019s\u00a0Capital in the Twenty-First Century, \u201cWe now know both that the United States has a much more unequal distribution of income than other advanced countries and that much of this difference in outcomes can be attributed directly to government action.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recently, researchers at Connecticut\u2019s Trinity College ploughed through the data and concluded that\u00a0the US Senate is responsive to the policy preferences of the rich<\/a>, ignoring the poor. And now there\u2019s that big study coming out in the fall from scholars at Princeton and Northwestern universities, based on data collected between 1981 and 2002.\u00a0Their\u00a0conclusion<\/a>: \u201cAmerica\u2019s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened\u2026 The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.\u201d\u00a0Instead, policy tends \u201cto tilt towards the wishes of corporations and business and professional associations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last month,\u00a0Matea Gold of\u00a0The Washington Post\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0on a pair of political science graduate students who released a study confirming that money\u00a0does\u00a0equal access in Washington. Joshua\u00a0Kalla and David Broockman drafted two form letters asking 191 members of Congress for a meeting to discuss a certain piece of legislation.\u00a0One email said \u201cactive political donors\u201d would be present; the second email said only that a group of\u00a0\u201clocal constituents\u201d would be at the meeting.<\/p>\n

One guess as to which emails got the most response. Yes,\u00a0more than five times as many legislators or their chiefs of staff offered to set up meetings with active donors than with local constituents.\u00a0Why is it not corruption when the selling of access to our public officials upends the very core of representative government?\u00a0When money talks and you have none, how can you believe in democracy?<\/p>\n

Sad, that it\u2019s come to this. The drift toward oligarchy that Thomas Piketty describes in his formidable new book on capital has become a mad dash. It will overrun us, unless we stop it.<\/p>\n

Syndicated from\u00a0Moyers & Company<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The evidence of income inequality just keeps mounting.\u00a0According to \u201cWorking for the Few,\u201d a recent briefing paper from Oxfam, \u201cIn the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.\u201d Our now infamous one percent own more than 35 percent of the nation\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":114184,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-114183","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}