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Akron
Beacon Journal...
Reason
to protest
October 4, 2011
The
mystery is: Why didn’t something
like the Occupy Wall Street campaign begin much earlier than three
weeks ago?
Now the idea has spread from its starting point in lower Manhattan,
loosely
linked collections of demonstrators gathering outside the Federal
Reserve Bank
in Chicago, near City Hall in Los Angeles, in Washington, D.C., with
plans in
the works from Memphis to Minneapolis and Baltimore.
Those
who have ventured among the
demonstrators have found a broad range of grievances. Some of the
protesters,
most of them younger, focus their fury on big banks. Others point at
big oil
companies. There is concern about the impact of globalization, the lack
of
jobs, even the heavy debt many students must accumulate to pay for
their
education. What pulls all of this dismay together? More than anything,
the
sense of something amiss is captured by the deepening income inequality.
The
complaint doesn’t involve envy, or
in some way a class war. Practically everyone understands the reality
of some
doing better than others, of the larger benefits of such financial
rewards.
What frustrates is the way incomes at the highest levels, the top 1
percent and
above, have soared in recent decades while those in the bottom 80
percent have
stagnated, and then eroded essentially in view of the rising cost of
health
care.
Before
the economic downturn, the
country mostly prospered for three decades. Does it seem fair that the
top 1
percent has enjoyed a 281 percent increase in income, compared to 25
percent
for those in the middle one-fifth of households?
Does
that reflect a division based on
merit, those at the top so much more the reason for the economy’s
performance?
And then the well-compensated Wall Street failed at its most basic
task,
deploying capital and managing risk.
The
inequality expands the higher up
the income ladder. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the
average
after-tax income of the top 0.01 percent of households went from
roughly $4
million in 1979 to more than $24 million — an increase in the area of
600
percent.
All
the while, the effective income
tax rate for the top 1 percent declined, according to the Internal
Revenue
Service, from 33 percent in the middle 1980s to 23 percent two decades
later.
Other industrial countries experienced similar rates of economic
growth. They
do not have such levels of income inequality. Many feature higher rates
of
upward mobility than this country.
What
do the demonstrators want? The
country would benefit from full attention paid to the widening
disparity in
incomes, to the wealthiest households capturing almost all of the
raises.
Read
it at the Akron Beacon Journal
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