frustrated
my_partner_doug.) Being college-educated insulates them from the worst unemployment, as does living in or near Washington, D.C. Their personal comfort robs them of a sense of urgency, such as is felt by the many citizens struggling to keep their lights on. Also, when the wealthy 10% and the non-wealthy 90% differ on policy decisions, the wealthy opinion almost always prevails, based on observations of past results.This is a problem, because when the gap between rich and poor gets too wide, a society tears itself apart. History is quite clear on that point. Even before it gets that bad, social aspects break down, causing an increase in crime and other problems. So then, things that increase, or fail to alleviate, the widening income gap are actually un-American in that they reduce the chance of America surviving as a nation. It would be bitterly ironic if one of the world's greatest social experiments collapsed because people couldn't be bothered to give a rat's ass about each other. What war couldn't accomplish, greed and indifference very well might.
March 8 2011, 16:30:47 UTC 10 years ago
March 8 2011, 17:39:55 UTC 10 years ago
Let's say you have a curve measuring "power" and you divide it into five sections based on equal amounts of power. If the bottom axis of the chart is wealth, then the power curve is going to be extremely skewed toward the "rich" end of the chart. With deflation, the whole rest of the chart's power goes up -- and while every dollar's value increases by the same amount, power does not grow in a flat curve, it's more a logarithmically decreasing growth. The more cash you have, the less your marginal increase in power is, because past a certain point, you can buy pretty much anything you want, and having more money just means you can buy space shuttles and moons instead of jet liners and islands, not actually that big a difference in practical terms. It only takes so much cash to buy a politician.
So giving the little guy a boost in money value gives them a bigger boost in practical power than giving the rich guy the same value boost per dollar. Poorer people can buy into housing, or afford an apartment; the middle class can afford to keep their houses, or buy larger ones, depending on which end they're on; rich people can buy houses as large as they want, just like before. Politicians pay more attention to the upper middle class and below, because they're contributing more to elections, while the rich have to actually compete for attention a little bit. And so on.