Rather than shouting "we hate rich people!" maybe DU could shout "we hate income disparity!" [View All]

[Political Heretic]

Income disparity.

This is the real evil.

The problem isn't that some people have more money than other people. The problem isn't that some people have been very well rewarded in their careers. It's pointless and counter productive to start making sweeping generalizations about every person out there who has more money than you do (which is the closest definition of "rich" DU has so far been able to agree on)...

The real problem is the ever-widening gap between richest and poorest Americans. The real problem is that wages have de-coupled from productivity where they used to parallel each other. Under "Reaganomics" wages continue to decline, while the economy "grew." The 400 wealthiest Americans saw their incomes double under Bush (I'll find the source in a second - reported in AP article yesterday). But DU needs to focus its anger - that wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that it happened while wages and worth for the bottom 80% of America were stagnating or declining. That's the problem. The gains of wealthiest Americans in THIS economy have been at the expense of the working-class and middle-class Americans.

That's in contrast to a time when the rich got richer at a slightly more modest pace, that kept in synch with the gradually ever-rising wages and living standards of everyone else.

Irrational sweeping generalization doesn't help anything. We need to talk about income disparity. We need to talk about the de-coupling of wages and productivity. Our goal isn't to "stick it" to rich people - our goal should be to return to a social structure in which everyone has a real shot at "making it big" if that's their desire, and where everyone can see their wages and worth grow over time.

I'm ok that I, working (currently) part time as a night desk person, only make 12$ an hour while my friend, who has been to school and specially trained, and worked his way up in a company for ten years as a computer engineer makes .... um, more. :) That seems fair to me. What isn't fair, is when our government's economic policy benefits him at MY expense.

We should be talking about that.