Pope Francis' denunciation of trickle-down economics and unfettered capitalism in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium came after numerous reports documented increasing economic inequality in Europe and in the United States. A Reuters new story on October 9, 2013 described a study by Credit Suisse which, in its World Wealth Report, found that global wealth had risen by 68 percent in the past decade to a new all-time high of $241 trillion, and that the United States accounted for nearly three quarters of the increase. The top 1 percent now owns 46 percent of the world's assets.
.A month earlier, the Associated Press along with other news outlets carried an equally disturbing study that surveyed the growth of economic inequality in the United States. It described an analysis of IRS figures from 1913 to the present by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University. Those economists found that the top 1 percent of U.S. wage earners garnered 19.3 percent of household income in 2012, which was their largest share in Internal Revenue Service figures in the one hundred years surveyed.
The economists noted that U.S. income inequality has been growing for almost three decades, but that, until this past year, the top 1 percent's share of pre-tax income had not yet surpassed the 18.7 percent share that was reached in 1927. One of the economists, Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, stated that the incomes of the richest Americans might have surged last year in part because they cashed in stock holdings to avoid higher capital gains taxes that took effect in January. The top 1 percent of American households had incomes above $394,000 last year.
Last month the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reported that among countries that it studied, the U.S. has the sixth highest poverty rate among households with at least one worker, or 12.1 percent of all U.S. households. The average poverty rate among OECD member countries is less than two-thirds of that level, at 8.1 percent. Additionally, in those households in which all adult members work, the U.S. regisiters the fourth highest poverty rate. The study found that U.S. also ranked well above the OECD average in terms of inequality, with an inequality level that was nearly 23 percent higher than the OECD average, and one which is the fifth-highest among all member nations. The OECD also noted that the level of inequality in the U.S. continues to rise, at a time when inequality in three of the other four nations with higher inequality levels than the U.S. inequality is falling - significantly in Turkey and Mexico, and moderately, in Chile.
The rise of the 1% and the oligopolies they have created have eroded
any pretense that the United States is still committed to equality of
opportunity. Sadly, a majority of Americans appear to be oblivious to
this abandonment and those members of the elite, who do know better,
have been cowed into submission as the American Dream recedes from view.
Whether the issue is progressive taxation, outsourcing and "free
trade," the rights of employees to unionize, an increase in the minimum
wage, universal health care, antitrust enforcement and regulation of the
financial markets, the need for a fairer tax system, or any other
fiscal policy that would address inequality, barely a passing mention is
made in the popular media or by what used to be called the chattering
class.
We were once an optimistic people, but today a
deafening silence pervades the public square, while hysteria mongers,
demagogues and the rightwing, incensed by the obvious challenge to their
insensitivity, condemn the pope as a Marxist or an economic illiterate.
To quote Yeats, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst /Are
full of passionate intensity."
The United States is now on a
collision course with history. If we fail to meet the present
challenges, our children and grandchildren will inherit a country
without a future. But there are still some glimmers of hope, faint as
they may be. The elections of Elizabeth Warren to the United States
Senate, Bill DeBlasio and Marty Walsh as mayors of New York and Boston,
the votes by residents of New Jersey and a county in Washington State to
increase the minimum wage, and the nationwide demonstrations by
thousands of poorly paid minimum wage workers employed by the Walmarts
and McDonalds of the USA suggest that the message of the Occupy Wall
Street movement is slowly gaining traction and that the progressive
spirit, although still feeble and flickering, might yet burst forth.
The excesses of the First Gilded Age in the United States were
countered by the rise of the Progressive era. Thornstein Veblen,Vernon
Parringon, Charles Beard, Lincoln Steffens, Herbert Croly and Walter
Lippmann, among others, provided the intellectual foundations for the
policies that were later adopted by Theodore Roosevelt, Robert Taft and
Woodrow Wilson. Three decades later, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck and
John Dos Passos depicted the misery of the Great Depression, and John
Maynard Keynes articulated the economic policies that led to the New
Deal and to the passage of the National Labor Relations Act and Social
Security.
There is nothing inevitable or irresistible about
the political and economic policies that human beings have created, and
that have evolved and been readjusted throughout human history. People
have the capacity, personally as well as collectively, to change - to
reconfigure those political and economic systems whenever they become
unresponsive or prove ill-adapted to changing needs.
The
religious traditions of the Western world remind us that each of us is
truly our neighbor's keeper. When we become indifferent to the plight of
others, we diminish ourselves and become estranged from all that makes
us compassionate, sentient beings.
The choice is ours. Will we give voice to the better angels of our nature or succumb to the blandishments of Mammon?