Our nation's moving toward a plutocracy

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

It should be pointed out the author is a business columnist with generally conservative leanings. However even he sees problems with our current economic disparity.

By James McCusker, Herald Columnist

The U.S. Census Bureau news release on "Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010" is just four pages long, but that's enough. The full report, at 95 pages, is just too depressing.

In some ways there are no surprises in the report, but clearly we've got a lot of work to do.

According to the bureau, median household income declined again, losing another 2.9 percent compared with 2009. This puts us back to just about where we were in 1996.

The number of Americans living in poverty in 2010 was 46.2 million, the largest number in the 52-year history of compiling this measure of our economy's performance. And in 2010 we added 900,000 people to the number of residents without health insurance, bringing the total to 49.9 million.

...

You can't have a lopsided income distribution for very long before you get the same pattern in wealth distribution, wealth being the accumulation of income not consumed.

And you can't have a lopsided wealth distribution for very long before you begin to see the signs of its influence on government. Some of us, as fans of both Pluto the dog and the recently defrocked planet, are reluctant to use the term plutocracy to describe government by the wealthy, but that is the word they use in the history books.

From an economics standpoint a plutocracy is not a good place to be. The dynamics of growth require change, competition and technical innovation, and plutocracy is the enemy of those things because they threaten wealth.

http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20110916/BIZ/709169885/1005

[FarLeftFist]

1. This guy gets it.

[Kennah]

2. I think the moving van arrived, and everything has already been unloaded

[applegrove]

3. This is so true:

"The dynamics of growth require change, competition and technical innovation, and plutocracy is the enemy of those things because they threaten wealth".

[ddddmuse]

4. Poverty et als

Thank you Ronald Reagan....from whence the destruction of the middle class began

[Riftaxe]

5. Neither party is interested in poverty

since people in poverty have neither cash or influence.

We will never see another war on poverty, there is just no political cachet to be gained from it.

[GreenPartyVoter]

8. You've hit it right on the head.

[Joe Fields]

12. The last war on poverty was pre-empted by the war in Vietnam.

As long as we continue to be in a perpetual state of war, even if the government was interested in devoting its resources to end poverty in America, it would never be able to commit money to it.

[Fumesucker]

6. It's basically been plutocracy forever with short interludes of somewhat less plutocracy..

Nowadays it's getting closer to a kakistocracy.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kakistocracy

[begin_within]

7. Moving toward? It already is a plutocracy.

[GreenPartyVoter]

9. "Are we there yet?"

I wish someone WOULD pull the car over and come back here. It would be a nice little break from heading over the cliff. *sigh*

[progressoid]

10. +1

[kenny blankenship]

11. a business columnist with generally conservative leanings

Explains why his conclusion is ~25 years behind the curve. We were "moving" towards a plutocracy under Reagan. We were fully there under Clinton. Under Bush-the-Lesser, the plutocracy was running riot and fucking in the streets. And under Obama, despite the little weak patch we encountered back in 2008, the party continues.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

13. "...moving toward..". Is that like being a little bit pregnant?

[Amonester]

14. Look, the cancer is simple to understand. The plutocrats 'buy' politicians

of all sides, using the people's money they grab after speculating on commodities, or after having been bailed out with the people's money, in order to make sure their owned politicians will always do their bidding (over the people's bidding).

They also make sure to use chunks of the people's money they appropriated themselves to spread the teaRoari$t fearmongering of "TAXES are BAAAAAAAAAAAD" and "BIG GOBERMINT is BAAAAAAAAAD" so they can KEEP a lot of the people's money for themselves and their inner circles of have's and have more's.
'
And it woRk$. Why it works? Go figure.

What is urgently needed is a Public Campaign Act (that would ban all politician 'buying' and make illegal all commodities speculations that gage their retail prices), and raise taxes directly to fund it.