The Rich Are Getting Richer Faster Than Ever

It’s a great time to be rich in America. People with incomes in the top 1% of Americans from 2003 to 2005 exceeded the total income of the poorest 20%. The rich are getting richer, faster than ever.

We are living in the new Gilded Age as corporate CEO’s regularly make hundreds of times the salary of the average worker and the stock market delivers more and more into the pockets of the already wealthy. We even have analogs to the robber barons of the first Gilded Age back in the 1870’s through the 1890’s. Now instead of owning vast railroad and steel empires, they sit in board rooms and manipulate the mass media and outsource jobs away from the least able to protest.

I have no problem with wealth, I do have a problem with the idea of a ruling elite populated by billionaires and their cronies. Right now that’s what we have in this country. Gone is the democracy of equality and fairness, replaced by capitalism run amuck. It’s time someone leveled the playing field a little. That’s why we need a congress and Presidency that will take a long hard look at the tax holiday the rich have been taking at everyone else’s expense.