American inequality
There is supposed to be a difference between the democrats and the republicans when it comes to the view on the subject inequality. Democrats are blue collar workers, minorities, intellectuals, globalists and working for a better world. Republicans are white wealthy people, nationalists, and working for more prosperity for themselves and for the U.S., regardless of consequences for others or for the environment. To some degree, this generalization might be true, but more from an ideologist sense than a practical sense. There is not much difference between the parties, and it is incredible difficult to drive change in Washington. The lobbyists, establishment, big tech, donors, military-industrial complex and politicians are interwoven and on top of this, the constitution makes structural change virtually impossible.
President Biden had claimed he would work on unity and fight poverty and inequality. During his presidency though, according to the government’s own Census Bureau, poverty has increased from 7.8% in 2021 to 12.4% today. This is about 40 million of the population. This is despite Biden spending about $1.1 trillion on welfare programs and $6 trillion on covid recovery and stimulus programs. It is unclear where all the money went.
One staggering aspect of the American society is the level of inequality, in particular when it comes to wealth and race. The top 1% holds 15x more wealth than the bottom 50% combined. One often hears democrats complain that the rich have political power to cut their taxes to almost nothing, sometimes literally nothing. In fact, Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world at that point, paid no federal income taxes in 2007 or in 2011. The 400 richest Americans pay a much lower overall tax rate than almost anyone else. What the democrats seem to forget is that every American use the same tax system, created by the politicians, both democrats and republicans, and within the framework of the system, many legally pay zero taxes. The problem is not one political party or the taxpayers, the problem is the tax system combined with political unwillingness to change it.
About 50% of Americans pay no income tax and about 50% of corporations pay no tax. Clearly something is wrong with a system full of deductibles, but the American population is not the issue. As the tax system is built on deductions, the more assets and wealth you have, the more deductions you can take, thereby reducing and minimizing the tax you pay.
In so many cases in America, the problem is systematic, created by politicians. Another area of inequality is that the racial wealth gap is even starker. The typical black household owns just 13 cents of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by the typical white household. Black people are jailed at 6x the rate of white people in the U.S. The creation of black segregated ghettos, poor education, unemployment, crimes and drug use have made it difficult for blacks to get a chance in society, but also here, it is a structural deliberate creation of an underclass. There seems to be limited or no interest to change this.
Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th president, once mentioned that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power, could destroy American democracy.”
Today, the wealthy do not necessarily aim to destroy democracy, but the establishment do not seem to understand that a change of the tax system is crucial to reduce inequality, reduce poverty, increase federal revenues and to make everyone pay a fair amount of taxes. The same unwillingness to change status quo seems to be the case for race related poverty and inequality. For some reason these problems are not on the agenda in Washington.