Here’s a staggering figure: According to The New York Times, the top 1 percent of American wage earners currently brings home 23.5 percent of the total income earned by all Americans.
So what? This is capitalist America, right? If you’re rich, you deserve to be rich; you earned that money, or your parents did, or maybe your grandparents did. We’re not commies after all.
Unfortunately, that assumption is leading to a growing problem in America. While the rich get richer, the poor are getting poorer. More significantly, the middle class is shrinking, disappearing into the polarity of rich or poor.
Our democratic – distinctly not communistic – system is based upon the existence of an educated middle class. Historically, societies that haven’t had a middle class – feudal Europe, for example – have been decidedly undemocratic, relatively tyrannical and, most importantly, stagnant.
It’s the middle class that’s responsible for innovation. In the ever-compelling race to get rich (because, let’s face it, we all want to be in that top 1 percent), the middle class has more often than not been responsible for developing the very innovations that we enjoy to this day. Because members of the middle class lie in that perfect spot where there exist both resources (which the poor do not have) and a compelling drive to “better” oneself (read: get rich), they tend to make new things.
Now, however, the American middle class is getting pinched. Thanks to our ever present conceptions that the rich should keep their money (tax cuts!) while the poor should get more money (welfare!), the people who end up shouldering the brunt of the system are those who aren’t rich enough to be able to afford it and aren’t poor enough to get anything out of it. In short, the middle class.
Under the burdens of a national financial crisis, rising mortgages, the credit crunch and any number of other financially-related media buzzwords, the middle class has begun to shrink while the number of poor people (which for our purposes can be defined as having a median income below the poverty level) has begun to grow. The rich are still rich though.
What can be done? Simply put, we should take some money from the rich. Actually, we should take a lot of money from the rich. Imagine you have $10. Someone taxes you at 50 percent, and now you have $5. That’s an astronomical burden for you to bear. Imagine, however, that you have, say, $40 million and you’re taxed at the same rate and now you have $20 million. You’re still going to be able to get along pretty well.
The rich can afford to be less rich, but the poor cannot afford to be poorer and the middle class, the backbone of democracy and innovation, needs to stay where it is, in the middle. We should be like Robin Hood and change America for the better.