My inner populist wants to scream

This kind of shit infuriates me to the n-th degree. On the one hand, the upper-class tax cuts so favored by Republicans have enabled America’s rich to claim an ever-increasing share of this nation’s wealth.

Trickle Up economics has just scored its greatest success and it is being covered up. I wonder why. Could it be embarrassment? The Internal Revenue Service recently released its fun-filled report on 2005 individual income taxes. The headline is that the super-rich were even more super than in any year since 1986 when the IRS first had comparable data. The news pages of The Wall Street Journal duly took note, but not many others did. The top 1 percent of all taxpayers earned 21.2 percent of all the money that individuals in the country earned in 2005. So one-hundredth of the taxpayers earned one-fifth of all income.

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From 1947 to 1992, the top 5 percent of all families never consumed more than 17 percent of the national "aggregate income." But since 1993, that top 5 percent has never earned less than 20 percent of the national bundle.

On the other hand, the poor are finding it harder and harder to get by.

NEW YORK - The calculus of living paycheck to paycheck in America is getting harder.

What used to last four days might last half that long now. Pay the gas bill, but skip breakfast. Eat less for lunch so the kids can have a healthy dinner.

Across the nation, Americans are increasingly unable to stretch their dollars to the next payday as they juggle higher rent, food and energy bills. It's starting to affect middle-income working families as well as the poor, and has reached the point of affecting day-to-day calculations of merchants like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., 7-Eleven Inc. and Family Dollar Stores Inc.

Food pantries, which distribute foodstuffs to the needy, are reporting severe shortages and reduced government funding at the very time that they are seeing a surge of new people seeking their help.

While economists debate whether the country is headed for a recession, some say the financial stress is already the worst since the last downturn at the start of this decade.

A good portion of this wealth concentration is directly attributable to cutting tax rates for the rich. The rational behind lowering top tax rates is that those in the upper tiers will spend more and hence generate greater growth in the economy. While that argument looks good on paper, it is complete and utter bullshit. A rising tide does not necessarily lift all boats.

Most modern societies, as a matter of course, redistribute wealth. Whether that redistribution is handled in an organized manner via taxation or the much messier version, with the business end of a gun (see any of the Communist revolutions in the 20th Century) is largely a function of how healthy the society is. History tells us that the larger the inequity, the more likely things get violent. Andrew Jackson once opined that a society should not be judged by how extravagantly it’s wealthy live but how well it’s most common citizens live. Looking at America in 2007, I think President Jackson would conclude that we have a good bit of work to do.