Col Owens: ‘Where is the money we need?’ Income inequality puts too much money in hands of too few

I believe it is important to set out some guidelines for the discussion underway in the Democratic Presidential primary, about taxing the wealthy much more progressively than we currently do, in order to pay for social goods such as health care for all.

We need to understand the relationship between the well-documented and very painful reality of income inequality, on the one hand, in which people doing the work that produces vastly increased wealth derive little or no benefit from that work, while owners and CEO’s derive enormous benefit from it; and on the other hand, tax changes, both historical such as those adopted in the Reagan era,, and those adopted last year in the Trump program, that allow those at the top to accumulate, with dramatically less impact of taxation, such vastly disproportionate shares of wealth.

Col Owens

The first of these phenomena, income inequality, derives from both tax policy and corporate board policies that push profits to themselves and other owners and investors, and away from employees that do the work that produces the earnings. The second of these phenomena, vastly reduced taxation of the wealthy, derives from legislative judgments regarding tax policy. And thus wealth policy.

For the ordinary public, believing that public goods such as health care for all should be pursued, options for paying for such goods are limited. In the U.S. of the 1950s and 1960s, when wealth was much more widely distributed among a growing middle class, public needs were not as great because a much larger share of the people could pay for more things on their own. They could decide regarding large needs between the benefits of private financing v. public financing.

But today, with private funds so limited for such a large portion of the citizenry, with the substantial part of total wealth held by the very top, there is really little option to looking there for the money with which to finance needed public goods – education, health care, infrastructure, public safety, etc.

So people should not be surprised or put off when candidates and others propose important public initiatives premised on dramatic increases in taxation of the very wealthy. If people don’t like that, they need to change the distribution of private money, the earnings of businesses. So the middle class could then fairly pay a higher share of public responsibility.

Collectively we pay a much too high price for this unbridled wealth accumulation.

In the end, we should all remember where the numbers are. There are far more of us ordinary people than there are these corporate oligarchs.

At some point the sleeping bear will wake up. And things will then change.

Col Owens is a retired attorney. He teaches Poverty Law at NKU’s Chase College of Law.