I’ll be purchasing the book, Winner -Take- All Politics, to read this spring. Here is a bit of a review from The Christian Century.
How the Rich Got Richer
by Anthony B. Robinson | Feb. 24, 2011 | The Christian Century
Since the late 1970s the wealthiest 1 percent of the nation’s population has pocketed more than 35 percent of the real national income growth, which is more than the bottom 90 percent of the population combined. Or looking at it from a different angle, between 1979 and 2006 the bottom 20 percent of the population had real income growth of 0.3 percent and the middle 20 percent had real income growth of 0.7 percent, while the top 1 percent enjoyed real income growth of an astonishing 260 percent.
Members of the middle class have stayed even economically amid the overall growth in the economy, but they’ve done so by working more or borrowing more—and often both. With the Great Recession—induced in large part by the failure to regulate banks and financial institutions, which allowed the wealthiest to become wealthier still—neither working more nor borrowing more remains an option. This decline of a stable and secure middle class, which once carried the freight for civil society, is the real story of the last 30 to 40 years in the U.S.
The decline of the U.S. middle class has a great deal to do with the multiple signs of a culture in disarray, from high divorce rates to rampant addiction, from Americans working so many more hours to the erosion of civic institutions. It has had an impact on the churches too. Churches that play a broad public role have struggled, while those that emphasize a more private salvation and a gospel of prosperity—which fit these times and their growing desperation—have grown.
It has been said by some that budgets are “moral” documents. I think I would rather say that budgets reflect our ethics. It seems to me that morality and “God-talk” have become watered down in the past 15 years in public discourse and used to divide rather than find solutions for the common good. Brian McLaren offers some interesting words on the topic.
Budgest are Still Moral Documents
by Brian McLaren | Feb. 25, 2011
You’ll be hearing in coming days, if you haven’t already, about the What Would Jesus Cut? campaign, launched byJim Wallis and the good people of Sojourners. It assumes that massive budget cuts are coming, but raises the question of where we start. If budget cuts are a fiscal necessity (more on that in a minute), asking what we cut is a moral necessity, hence the campaign’s title, intended to attract the attention – and stimulate the conscience – of American Christian voters. We all need to be reminded in the midst of what can become budget-frenzy that budgets are moral documents, and that the love of money can cause people to all sorts of evil things.
Cutting programs that save lives in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is morally unacceptable. Far better to ask questions like these:
How can we increase taxes on what we want less of (pollution, waste, pornography, tools of violence) and reduce taxes on what we want more of (work, earning, education, research and development, alternative energy, etc.)?
Why does a small segment of the super-rich control a larger and larger portion of national wealth, what are the consequences of this trend, and what should be done about it?
What percent of the national budget should be spent on the military? Are we heeding Eisenhower’s well-known but too-little-heeded warning and advice about the “military-industrial complex?”