Share It Now Or Lose It Later

The rich lost some money in the Bush recession, but most of them didn't get hurt too bad -- and they recovered quickly. They are now making more money than ever. The recession is over for them. But that's not true of all Americans. For most, the recession is still going on, and it's getting harder than ever to make ends meet. The bottom half of all Americans (actually the bottom 47%) were completely wiped out. They have gone from an average wealth of $15,000 to nothing. They owe more than they own.

This bottom 47% should be the people that Congress worries about. They should be the people Congress is trying to help. Because a nation, any nation, is in real trouble when half of its population has no wealth at all -- even this nation, the richest nation on Earth. The United States has plenty of wealth -- it is just that too much of it is concentrated in the hands of too few people, while too many people have nothing.

The rich, and their Republican allies, think this is the way things should be. They like to think they earned their riches by their hard labor, but that's just not true. Many of them inherited their vast wealth, while others made their money off the labor of many others (and refused to share the fruits of that labor with those who performed it), and some made that money by destroying what others had built. But none of them could live on what they want to pay others for back-breaking labor.

Now they, and their GOP lackeys, want to take even more money from the bottom 80% so that they can have lower taxes and even fatter bank accounts -- and they really don't care that the bottom 50% to 80% are disappearing, and slipping into the dire financial situation now experienced by the bottom half of all Americans. They are creating a nation of haves and have nots, with no one in the middle and nothing shared with the have nots.

This cannot go on forever. Eventually we will have to even the distribution of income and wealth. The rich (and the Republicans) call this class war, and demonize any re-distribution of wealth downward. They don't admit that wealth is already being re-distributed -- upwards to the rich from all of the rest of us. But the downward re-distribution will have to happen, because people can only take so much. Then they strike back. Right now we have a choice. We can make our system fairer for all, or we can wait for the rebellion that surely will happen if we do not make it fairer. Those are the only choices.