Rodent Regatta

Last night on Now With Bill Moyers, pbs attempted to slant the entire program with this premise:

The war in Iraq isn’t going according to plan. Announcer, Now With Bill Moyers, April 9, 2004.

Having positioned the interviews with guests around this thought, Moyers proceeded to lay out the plan for the Democrats to win the Presidency in November.

One of the interviews was with Kevin Phillips. He’s another of the critics of the Bush family and their politics. However, he also pointed out several key factors that are reshaping the way we’ll think about politics in the USA.

You can make too much out of inequality because there’s always going to be a lot of it. But when it reaches a certain point where it’s built up to these extreme levels that we’ve seen today, for example the top one percent has as much disposable income as either the bottom 50 percent or the bottom third, depending on what you trust. You’ve got such an outrageous mismatch of the American opportunity with the American reality that it creates its own corruption. Kevin Phillips, Now With Bill Moyers, April 9, 2004.

Having studied wealth and democracy most of his life, Phillips wrote the following for the Los Angeles Times in April of 2000:

The share of U.S. wealth in the hands of the top 5%-and specifically the top 1%- has reached levels not seen since 1929 and expanded by more than $1 trillion. New data show corporate CEOs now receiving 475 times as much in annual compensation as the average blue-collar worker, an all-time record disparity. But the rich have had to share this cornucopia with the Internal Revenue Service as well as with yacht dealers and hedge funds so that, even at low tax rates, it’s been the key source of deficit reduction.

The reverse could be true with a bear market. The budget could go back into the red in a year or so, putting pressure on popular spending programs, scotching GOP arguments for top-bracket tax cuts and increasing pressure for new revenue from tax increases just when current economic data are profiling the top 1% or 2% of Americans as the fattest financial geese in the history of the republic. Kevin Phillips, With Inequality Of Income And Tax Burden Growing, Expect The Widening Rich/Poor Divide To Focus The Political Debate, April 16, 2000.

Phillips has another article that will run in the Los Angeles Times tomorrow. It is likely that this notion of the “great divide” in America will continue to be the Democrats’ primary stump speech. Learn now and form your own opinions about how our culture is changing.

Will our children be the first American generation that is unable to maintain a higher living standard than their parents?