Alexander Ryking

The issues are difficult to address with Congress largely on the side of the wealthy. At the very least:

(1) Eliminate the tax break on unearned income (capital gains). The richest Americans, who own most of the stocks, should not pay a smaller tax than everyone else.

(2) Implement a small financial transactions tax. It would be easy to administer on computer trades, it would generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue, and it would help guard against the reckless speculation that devastated the financial markets and our country.

TED organizers invited a multimillionaire Seattle venture capitalist named Nick Hanauer… to give a speech on March 1 at their TED University conference. Inequality was the topic – specifically, Hanauer’s contention that the middle class, and not wealthy innovators like himself, are America’s true “job creators…”

“We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years,” he said. “Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Rather they are a consequence of an ecosystemic feedback loop animated by middle-class consumers, and when they thrive, businesses grow and hire, and owners profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.”

You can’t find that speech online. TED officials told Hanauer initially they were eager to distribute it… But early this month they changed course, telling Hanauer that his remarks were too “political” and too controversial for posting.

The Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have been making waves with a new book acknowledging a truth that, until now, was unmentionable in polite circles. They say our political dysfunction is largely because of the transformation of the Republican Party into an extremist force that is “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” You can’t get cooperation to serve the national interest when one side of the divide sees no distinction between the national interest and its own partisan triumph.

So how did that happen? For the past century, political polarization has closely tracked income inequality, and there’s every reason to believe that the relationship is causal. Specifically, money buys power, and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties, in the process destroying any prospect for cooperation.

And the takeover of half our political spectrum by the 0.01 percent is, I’d argue, also responsible for the degradation of our economic discourse, which has made any sensible discussion of what we should be doing impossible.

Wall Street excess helped lead to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, inflicting untold economic suffering on millions and millions of Americans. In both rhetorical and substantive terms, the Obama administration’s response was by any reasonable measure moderate and restrained. Indeed, Obama clearly viewed himself as a buffer between Wall Street and rising populist passion, telling a group of bankers in April of 2009: “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

Despite all the wailing, Obama’s subsequent Wall Street reform bill simply was not a threat to the established order of things in any meaningful sense…

Yet despite all this, many Wall Streeters have responded with an extraordinary outburst of resentment, grievance, and self pity. They’ve shoveled enormous sums of money in the direction of the [Republican Party] whose main driving objective is to roll back everything in the way of new oversight Obama and Dems have put into place in response to the worst meltdown in decades.

One wonders if there is anything Obama could say to make these people happy, short of declaring that rampant inequality is a good thing…