Here's a terrific article by Mike Lofgren in
The American Conservative about the revolt of the super-rich. The whole thing is worth reading, but here's the meat of the argument:
...the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot.
Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension—and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?
Being in the country but not of it is what gives the contemporary American super-rich their quality of being abstracted and clueless. Perhaps that explains why Mitt Romney’s regular-guy anecdotes always seem a bit strained.
And here's an interesting fact about who is supporting our government (our military, our health care system, our highways, our space program):
In 1950, payroll and other federal retirement contributions constituted 10.9 percent of all federal revenues. By 2007, the last “normal” economic year before federal revenues began falling, they made up 33.9 percent. By contrast, corporate income taxes were 26.4 percent of federal revenues in 1950. By 2007 they had fallen to 14.4 percent.
Lofgren has written a new book,
The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted. We just may have to pick it up.
