Our Sinful Economy

From the Progressive:

Average real incomes fell by 3 percent between 2000 and 2004.

Looked at over the past 25 years, things don't get any better. From 1979 to 2004, 'the bottom 60 percent of Americans, on average, made less than 95 cents in 2004 for each dollar they reported in 1979,' the Times reports. For those on the top 95th to top 99th rungs of the income ladder, the past quarter century was splendid: Their income went up 53 percent. And those on the top 0.1 percent rung? Their income went up 348 percent.

That is obscene.

We have a plutocracy in this country, not just of the rich or the very rich but of the unbelievably rich. This 0.1 percent are the ones who benefit most from the George Bush economy.

As he once put it, “Some people call you the elite. I call you my base.”

Meanwhile, the poorest 60 million Americans “reported average incomes of less than $7 a day.”

Seven bucks a day! That barely gets one meal at McDonald’s.

Our economy is a sin.

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And there you have, in brief, what is probably the biggest and most compelling reason that I now consider myself to be a progressive, or a leftist, or more simply a liberal, whatever you want to call it. Years ago, I was a conservative, at least on economic issues. I understood and bought fully the whole pro-business, right-wing, "classical liberal" economic point of view: the market knows best; governmental economic regulation is almost always bad for the economy; a thriving economy ultimately raises the poor out of poverty; most poor people are poor because they don't take advantage of the many opportunities afforded them by our great nation. Yadda, yadda, yadda. It was extraordinarily easy to accept these economic "truisms" while ensconced inside the cushy and well-to-do suburban bubble in which I grew up. After all, almost every adult to whom I was exposed in such an environment seemed to be living proof of the these ideas.

It wasn't until much later that the whole edifice came crashing down. I met people who had worked their asses off for years and got nothing for it. I met people who didn't have the family resources to get them into college, to get them moved into a place of their own, to get connections for career building. I came to realize that the conservatives, who claimed that pro-business politics would eventually help the poor, didn't really give a rat's ass one way or another whether that actually happened. I came to realize that I had been fed a bunch of bullshit myths about the way the world works, that there were just enough people living out the "American dream" to make it appear as though it was available to everybody. I came to understand that the "economy" is simply a giant winner-take-all game rigged in favor of the people who had already won. It became self-evident that most Americans were never going to get much for their hard work.

Elementary moral principles make it obvious that this is an unacceptable situation. Our economy is, indeed, sinful as all get out. At the age of 38, a time of life when many white males in the US traditionally turn more conservative, I'm becoming more liberal. On the one hand, it's extraordinarily depressing and disillusioning to realize that much of what I once believed is a lie. But I wouldn't have it any other way: despite this loss, I now believe myself to be a more moral person--it's much easier this way, actually; I don't have to do mental gymnastics in order to dismiss the economic injustice in this country.

At the very least, I have a cause for which to live, and that beats the hell out of shopping at the mall or buying a fishing boat.

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