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Tag: 1 percent
Clinton Must Address Income Inequality In 2016

Clinton Must Address Income Inequality In 2016

Poor Hillary Clinton. She’s rich. And that’s a problem for her presidential campaign.

Even as the economy finally mounts an apparently sustained recovery, income inequality remains a primary worry for American voters. According to a poll by the Pew Research Center last November, 78 percent saw the gap between the haves and the have-nots as a big problem.

Since the 1970s, wages have been stagnating for average workers, who have been buffeted by the crosswinds of globalization and the technological revolution. Factories have fled to cheaper lands. Jobs that were once commonplace — such as those of bank tellers and grocery store clerks — have been lost to technological innovations: ATMs and digital scanners. Meanwhile, the economic gains have accumulated in the bank accounts of a wealthy few.

Clinton — who shares with her husband, former president Bill Clinton, an estimated net worth of more than $20 million — is definitely among those haves. That means the optics of her lifestyle are considerably different from those of Barack and Michelle Obama when he sought the White House: They had barely paid off their student debt.

But appearances aren’t the biggest problem for the former secretary of state. Plenty of rich folk have won the White House in the past; wealth is clearly no barrier.

The far bigger problem for her is that she is not easily associated with the battle to lift up the 99 percent, unlike, say, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). If Warren runs for the presidency, as many observers assume she will, Clinton needs to quickly come up with a viable plan to restore America’s dwindling middle class. That ought to be the centerpiece of her campaign.

For that matter, her rivals, especially among the Republicans, need viable proposals to restore the middle class, too. (Warren has said she will not run, but Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described socialist, is considering a run for the Democratic nomination. He is a longtime advocate for average workers.)

Mitt Romney’s greatest weakness during his 2012 presidential campaign wasn’t his wealth, which, at an estimated $250 million, dwarfs that of the Clintons. His Achilles’ heel was his clear disdain for those who struggle to make ends meet, evidenced in his infamous remarks about the “47 percent.”

He was also weakened by his association with Bain Capital, a private equity firm that, among other things, bought up companies and sometimes streamlined their workforces. In an age of widespread economic anxiety, Obama was able to paint Romney as a callous — and clueless — plutocrat.

Clinton can’t be so easily characterized as an out-of-touch member of the 1 percent; her political positions fit comfortably within the moderate-to-liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Still, she is associated with the centrist economic policies of her husband, who worked hard during his presidency to cozy up to Wall Street and change the image of the Democratic Party, which was believed to be hostile to the business elite. Indeed, President Clinton helped to loosen some of the regulations that had held Wall Street in check.

The results of that loosening are still wreaking havoc on households across the country. The big banks, reckless and greedy, used their new freedom to crash the economy. And, unfortunately, many of the moguls responsible for the mess were unscathed by the wreckage.

As if that were not galling enough, the taxpayers bailed out Wall Street, even as millions of average folks lost their homes to foreclosure. The bailout may have been necessary, but it’s still infuriating. Clinton needs to demonstrate that she understands the anger still loose in the land — among liberal and conservative voters alike.

She needs to be able to answer questions about the high-dollar fees that she has collected from exclusive audiences and about the campaign contributions she has accepted from corporate interests, especially Wall Street types. But more than that, she needs a set of policies that go beyond raising the minimum wage.

She may have to risk alienating some of her big-money donors if she is to assist the shrinking middle class. If she has the courage to do that, Clinton will be hard to beat.

Photo: Canada2020 via Flickr

Oxfam: Richest 1 Percent Soon To Own Half Of World’s Wealth

Oxfam: Richest 1 Percent Soon To Own Half Of World’s Wealth

by dpa (TNS)

LONDON — The richest 1 percent of the world’s population will soon own more than half of global wealth, unless there is drastic wealth redistribution, Oxfam said Monday.

The British charity said the share of the world’s wealth owned by the richest 1 percent rose from 44 percent in 2009 to 48 percent last year, and that 2015 would see half the world’s wealth in the hands of just 1 percent.

Oxfam, which used data from a series of Credit Suisse reports, said that over half of the wealth not owned by the richest 1 percent belongs to the richest 20 percent.

Some economists have taken issue with Oxfam’s reading of the statistics, noting that early-career professionals who spend all their income would fall into the “poor” classification and that people in rich countries who own even modest homes would come within the world’s top 1 per cent in asset terms.

The report was released to coincide with the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Oxfam head Winnie Byanyima, who is co-chairing the Davos business gathering, demanded action towards wealth redistribution.

“It’s time our leaders took on the powerful vested interests that stand in the way of a fairer and more prosperous world,” she said in a statement.

“The poor are hurt twice by rising inequality; they get a smaller share of the economic pie and, because extreme inequality hurts growth, there’s less pie to be shared around.”

Photo: A. Currell via Flickr.com

Cartoon: Poor Jamie Dimon

Cartoon: Poor Jamie Dimon

Gilded Youth And Their Pain

Gilded Youth And Their Pain

A Hollywood-handsome Princeton grad recently shot his hedge-fund-founder father to death. The alleged reason: Thomas Gilbert Sr.’s plan to cut his allowance by $200 a month. You can imagine what the tabloids are doing with the story.

There’s a lot going on here, and while mental illness is almost certainly part of it, as said, there’s a lot going on. For the public, there’s no little satisfaction (there must be a better word) in the tragedy’s message for the economically struggling masses: Money can’t cure all ills. Or going further, money causes ills.

Tommy Gilbert, the accused, shuttled between his Manhattan pad and the posh Hamptons. He attended swank parties and supposedly had plans to start his own hedge fund. That’s not an unusual set of facts for the gilded children of America’s rich.

The details that stick out are these: Tommy was 30 years old, and his parents were still giving him an allowance — of $3,000 a month (according to the New York Post). The decision to shrink the monthly handout by a strangely small sum seemed calculated to humiliate. Moreover, the $200 was stipulated to come out of the spending money, not rent.

I’ll stop right there. I may have already overstepped the bounds in speculating about a family I have never met. But both social and traditional media have been all over this story, theorizing that the rich may be different from you and me, to borrow from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but they are also more messed up.

The affluent have been widely perceived as impervious to the slings and arrows that afflict ordinary people. That’s why relatively little research has gone into their children’s psychological anguish — which in many cases is immense.

Dr. Suniya Luthar, a psychologist at Arizona State University, accidentally discovered this reality while studying inner-city teens, she writes in Psychology Today. For comparison, she also observed teens from prosperous suburban families, defined as making $150,000 or more a year.

To Luthar’s surprise, the affluent teens did much more poorly on measures of drug use and binge drinking and no better than their low-income contemporaries on cheating and stealing. The richer kids were also found to have the highest rates of anxiety, depression and substance abuse of any group of children in the country.

“There is a tacit assumption — even among those most affected,” Luthar writes — “that education and money procure well-being, and that if children falter, they will swiftly get the appropriate services.”

She says that may have been somewhat true in the past, but it’s no longer the case. Today’s emotional disturbances are being more fueled by pressure for “high-octane achievement.” Many parents seem totally focused on their children’s high-status accomplishments, whether in academics, in sports or in social conquest.

This puts boys especially “at risk for limited compassion and kindness,” Luthar adds. They are unhappy and desperate to make as much money as their parents. To them, that requires getting into prestigious colleges.

In her book The Price of Privilege, therapist Madeline Levine describes how affluent parents, however well meaning, push their children toward materialism, perfectionism and competition while being disconnected from them in a personal way. The relationships are basically mechanical in nature.

Luthar says the problem is not necessarily one of richer parents not being around or inattentive. They are often all over the kids. The problem is constant adult criticism that the children are somehow not measuring up, with little emphasis on emotional closeness.

At a time when many Americans obsess over growing income inequality, it may be hard to feel for children on the moneyed side of the equation. But pain is pain.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: Johnathaneric – On & Off / Off & On via Flickr