Tag: Income inequality

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Taxing and Spending

So April 15th has come and gone. Did you get a refund? Or did you have to send a check to Uncle Sam? It turns out that millions of Americans who are used to getting a refund from the IRS are having to pay up this year. That’s because of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, passed by a high-fiving Republican Congress and signed off on by President Trump.

So, if your taxes were cut, why are you having to pay more at tax time this year? Last summer, the Government Accounting Office issued a warning to employed taxpayers to check their withholding status, which for most wage-earners went down under the new law. The reason for the warning being that the less the government withholds from your paycheck, the more you owe at the end of the year. Hence all the surprised — and ticked off — folks who are suddenly having to pay the IRS instead of getting a check.

The bottom line is that, for most people, taxes haven’t gone up (though they will in coming years); it’s just a restructuring of how they’re collected. But the real pay-off in the Republicans’ “tax reform” went to the wealthiest Americans and big corporations, who got a trillion-and-a-half dollar tax cut. Inheritance taxes were also cut way back, and those who own stocks got a nice break, as well.

The national debt is higher than ever, and will continue grow under these cuts, but hey, all that dough will trickle down eventually, say the Republicans. And if doesn’t, well, we’ll just have to cut “entitlements,” like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

This has to stop. This GOP obeisance to a debunked Reagan-era economic policy has driven income inequality in this country to an unsustainable place. Here are a few numbers: 69 percent of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings! More than 93 percent of the stock market is owned by 20 percent of Americans (80 percent of Americans own little or no stock). Ten percent of Americans own 83 percent of the country’s wealth. The other 17 percent goes mostly to the shrinking middle class, with less than two percent owned by the bottom 40 percent of Americans. Toss in the pressures of unaffordable medical care, soaring education costs, and rent increases brought on by gentrification and it’s no wonder the American middle class is a vanishing species.

My wife and I didn’t get hit too badly, but we did have to write a four-figure check to the government. That said, we paid $1,000 and change (plus the taxes withheld from our paychecks) more than Amazon, which made $11 billion in profits in 2018 and got a one-percent refund! We also paid more in taxes than Delta Airlines, Chevron, General Motors, John Deere, Halliburton, Netflix, IBM, Goodyear, and more than 30 other major American corporations who paid no tax or got a refund from the IRS.

The top four Big Pharma companies pocketed $4 billion in tax savings. J.P. Morgan landed a sweet $3.7 billion tax cut. The list goes on and on.

The rationale for the corporate cuts was that big companies would use the savings to invest in new factories and employ more Americans. Nope. In reality, what happened was nearly $1.1 trillion in stock buybacks by America’s large corporations. They didn’t reinvest the tax dividend in the economy; they reinvested it in their own stock and gave huge raises to their corporate officers. Many of these companies actually laid off workers.

And here’s another kick in the pants: While the GOP made the tax cuts for corporations permanent, the nominal cuts they gave to most Americans are set to expire over the next eight years. By 2027, most Americans will be paying a higher percentage of their income in taxes than they are now.

We are becoming a nation of the very wealthy and the working poor. If we don’t reverse course, the American middle class will shrink to a non-factor. And if we don’t put spending money in the hands of more Americans, the economy will collapse again, just as it did in 2008 — and in 1929.

It’s not socialism to create a minimum wage that allows people to save and invest and buy cars and homes. It’s not socialism to try to ensure that all Americans have access to affordable health care so that the next medical emergency won’t send them into bankruptcy or cost them their home. It’s not socialism to tax corporations at a reasonable rate. It’s common sense. Amazon needs customers; so do all of those other corporations who pay less in taxes than you do. We’ve been trickled down on long enough. It’s time to rebuild — from the bottom up.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Democracy, If We Can Keep It

Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once famously said, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” If Brandeis is correct, we no longer have a democracy in the U.S., or, at best, we are damn close to losing it.

An economic report released this week by the Oxfam organization concluded that income inequality has reached unprecedented levels. To illustrate, Oxfam noted that three Americans — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett — hold a total of $263 billion in wealth, which is equal to the holdings of the lower 50 percent of the American population at large, or 160 million people.

So, to reiterate: Three guys have as much money as the total amount of wealth held by 50 percent of American citizens. Worldwide, the figures are just as staggering. Oxfam reported that 42 people now own as much wealth as the bottom 3.7 billion people living on the planet.

The U.S. governing bodies — the House and Senate — are mostly run by millionaires who became millionaires by doing the bidding of billionaires via special interest lobbies and corporate donations. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision — which decreed, essentially, that corporations are people with the right to “free speech,” meaning they have the right to contribute unlimited funds to political advertising — has polluted and corrupted the electoral process to an astonishing degree in just eight years.

The Trump presidency has stepped it up another notch by appointing billionaires to most key cabinet positions. And almost without exception, they are serving the very corporations they are supposed to be regulating. Millions of acres of our National Parks are being sold off to mining, oil, and lumber interests. Off-shore drilling rights are being granted near the beaches, coral reefs, and fishing grounds of our coastal states. Banking and financial investment regulations are being loosened. Environmental laws are being repealed or rolled back or ignored. Public school funding is being curtailed, as money gets funneled into for-profit “educational” institutions. Health care is becoming a luxury the poor and working-class can’t afford.

All in the name of greed. All in the pursuit of accumulating more money by those who already have more than most of us would see if we lived 10 lifetimes.

We’ve been here before in our history, most recently in 2007-2008, when the subprime mortgage crisis nearly destroyed the economy. The Wall Street cowboys thought the Ponzi-scheme housing bubble they’d created would never burst. But it did, and fabled financial institutions, including Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Citibank, and AIG went down in flames. The U.S. automobile industry went on life support. The government threw $700 billion at the banks to bail them out, and poured another $800 billion stimulus into the economy. It worked, eventually, but a lot of folks got burned; a lot of folks lost everything.

Now, here we are, 10 years later, and it’s party time again. Regulations? We don’t need no steenking regulations! The economy is booming! Unemployment is low. The stock market is hitting another all-time high every week. What could go wrong?

Maybe nothing. Maybe we just soar and soar into the great wide open, as the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting screwed by the trickle-down myth. But karma is a bitch, and the universe has a way of correcting imbalances. So do democracies, if they can survive long enough to vote the money-changers out of the temple.

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Editorial Opinion

Memphis Inequality: A Vicious Cycle

It is axiomatic that, after one week of a new year, most people will have long since forsaken their chief resolutions and gone back to spooning up that extra bit of sugar for their coffee or blowing off that planned get-in-shape regimen as being too much to worry with.

We can only hope that, with a new Memphis city government freshly sworn in, its members will be the exception and will hold steadfast to all the resolves they made in our name (or at least to get our vote) during the recent election. We certainly have a right to hope that our new mayor, former Councilman Jim Strickland, takes proper care of the litany of issues that he intoned so often during the mayoral race — public safety, blight, and accountability. But, after hearing him speak at the Cannon Center on New Year’s Day upon his inauguration, we are even more hopeful regarding his fidelity to a new set of ideas he announced apropos the social welfare of his city-ful of constituents.

As was noted in the “Politics” column this week, one sentence of Strickland’s was especially striking. It bears repeating here: “We are a city rife with inequality; it is our moral obligation, as children of God, to lift up the poorest among us.”

Not only did Strickland not speak so succinctly of what may be our most pressing problem during the campaign; neither did any of his opponents. “Inequality.” That is certainly the elephant in our room — and in our streets and workplaces. The new mayor reminded us that, on election night, he had promised to employ “new eyes to solve old problems.”

The social and economic inequality of which he spoke on Inauguration Day is certainly the oldest of these problems — and the most difficult to resolve. Yet all of the other problems facing the city and its mayor are inextricably tied to that one.

As Strickland also said: “We have debt that must be paid, a pension that must be funded, and a tax base moving away.” Clearly, the persistence of a large underclass of impoverished citizens excacerbates all of those conditions.

And there was this statement in the inauguration speech, an echo of similar ones made over and over during the campaign year, not only by Strickland, but by a variety of council candidates (for some of them the solitary plank in their public platforms): “We will focus on the goal of retaining and recruiting quality police officers and firefighters, knowing public safety is at the forefront of rebuilding our city.”

That’s all very well, but the several hundred police officers who left the city’s service in recent years made it as clear as could be that the slashing of their benefits was their single most pressing reason for dissatisfaction. They haven’t gone home to collect unemployment; in significant numbers they have found kinder niches in other departments elsewhere.

Inequality means a reduced tax base, which means a shrunken budget — which means a harder task to recruit first responders and more incentives for an uneasy middle class to decamp. And that, of course, means further reduction in the tax base.

It’s what you call a vicious cycle, but we’re glad that Mayor Strickland has taken note of it, and we wish him all the best in tackling these issues over the next four years.

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Politics Politics Feature

Pending Matters in Shelby County

Newly inaugurated Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland kept himself on solid ground with the electorate, and may have expanded his beachhead somewhat, with a post-swearing-in address on New Year’s Day that added significant new terms to the lexicon of his political rhetoric.

More so than in his campaign speeches, which hewed to his themes of public safety, action on blight, and employee accountability, Strickland made a conspicuous effort to broaden his constituency. His key passage: “Here on this day of renewal, this time of celebration, we must recognize that we are a city rife with inequality; it is our moral obligation, as children of God, to lift up the poorest among us.”  

The mayor’s implicit commitment to social action was reinforced by specific promises “to expand early childhood programs,” “to provide greater access to parks, libraries, and community centers,” and “to increase the number of summer youth and jobs programs.”

• The year-end resignation of long-beleaguered county Election Administrator Rich Holden creates an opening that the Shelby County Election Commission must fill. Final deadline for applications to the newly vacated position is next Wednesday, January 13th, according to Janice Holmes, deputy administrator of Shelby County government.

One of those actively campaigning for the position is Chris Thomas, an employee of the Redwing public strategies group who has served previously as Probate Court clerk and as a Shelby County commissioner.

• In the ongoing movie series based on the fictional boxer Rocky Balboa, there was a never-ending stream of new challengers to Rocky’s championship title, each one with a plausible case to make for beating the champ, each one a loser finally, though usually after a bruising and suspenseful struggle.

The difference between Balboa and 9th District congressman Steve Cohen, who, since first winning his congressional seat in 2006, has also faced a different contender for his title in each successive election season, is that Cohen has hardly ever been forced to raise a sweat in disposing of his opponents.

Nikki Tinker in 2008, Willie Herenton in 2010, Tomeka Hart in 2012, Ricky Wilkins in 2014: Each of these would-be Democratic primary claimants to the 9th District seat came into the race against Cohen with a show of credentials and a fair degree of ballyhoo. Each went down hard in the end, with Cohen’s edge against them on election day usually turning out to be somewhere between four to one and eight to one. (Wilkins fared better, losing only 2 to 1.)

Now here — as first reported in the Flyer‘s wrap-up edition of 2015 — comes another worthy looking to take the seat away from Cohen: State Senator Lee Harris, who previously served most of a term on the Memphis City Council and who had been, Cohen says, formally endorsed by the congressman both in his 2011 council race against Kemba Ford and his 2014 win over then-incumbent state Senator Ophelia Ford.

Harris has confirmed his interest in seeking the 9th District seat. If he runs, it would be his second try for the office. The University of Memphis law professor was, along with Cohen and a dozen or so others, a Democratic primary candidate for the seat in 2006, the year incumbent congressman Harold Ford Jr. vacated it to run for the U.S. Senate.

Harris didn’t fare so well in that maiden effort, finishing near the bottom among the 15 primary contenders, but his status was considerably enhanced by his council and state senate victories, the latter allowing him to become leader of the five-member Democratic Senate caucus.

If he enters the race, Harris has indicated his campaign would be of the generalized it’s-time-for-a-change variety, though he has taken issue with Cohen on the matter of the congressman’s opposition to Governor Bill Haslam’s Tennessee Promise program of subsidies for community college students, funded by using proceeds of the Hope Lottery. Cohen, who objected to the diversion of funds as favoring higher-income students over lower-income ones, was the guiding force behind the creation of the state lottery as a longtime state senator.

• The ongoing power struggle between the administration of Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell and an apparent majority faction of the county commission was apparently not subject to any time-outs during the holidays. Indeed, it seems to have intensified over the break — to the point of open warfare.

Two matters in December have pushed the combatants to the brink: 1) a December 18th hand-delivered letter from commission chairman Terry Roland to Luttrell  threatening the mayor with “removal procedures” if he persisted in resisting a commission resolution appointing former Commissioner Julian Bolton as an independent attorney responsible to the commission; and 2) a bizarre circumstance whereby a Roland resolution seeking a transfer of the county’s budget surplus — a disputed amount running somewhere from $6 million to $20-some million —from the administration to the commission’s contingency fund reached the state comptroller’s office in a form that seemed to call for the transfer of the county’s entire fund balance of some $108 million.

The latter situation is being denounced by allies of Roland as nothing short of forgery committed somewhere in the administration before being transmitted to Nashville. After Sandra Thompson of the state comptroller’s office responded to Luttrell that the resolution featuring the larger sum was illegal, Roland sent a letter to Thompson charging that alterations had been made in his resolution, not only in the amount sought in the transfer, but in the enabling language of the resolution.

Roland’s letter included copies of both his original resolution, which — given a longstanding dispute between Luttrell and the commission — omitted any sums whatever, and what Roland called a “blatantly altered” copy that was sent to the comptroller’s office, which seemed to spell out a request for the transfer of the entire fund balance, which would be an astonishing demand, and which, noted Thompson, would leave the county without cash available to support spending in its General Fund and in potential violation of state law.

According to Roland’s letter, “When the altered document was brought to my attention I immediately contacted Harvey Kennedy, CAO, to address the issue and clarify my intentions. Mayor Mark Luttrell confirmed via a conversation with me that he was aware the document was altered. … I would never place Shelby County in [a] position where insufficient resources would be available to provide the cash flow needed for operations.”

Meanwhile, conversations and correspondence have flowed back and forth between commissioners and the administration, with the latter contending that a clerical error accounted for the apparent alteration in the resolution and Commissioner Heidi Shafer, a Roland ally in the struggle, concurring with the chairman that conscious skullduggery was involved.

Shafer sees a silver lining to the imbroglio, however. She believes that publicity concerning the matter has put the administration so clearly on the defensive that Luttrell will be willing to compromise with Roland on the independent-attorney issue — despite his statement, in a November 19th letter to Roland that he would stand by “a clear, unambiguous opinion from the county attorney that Resolution #16A [calling for Bolton’s appointment] violates the county charter.”

Roland and his supporters on the commission maintain that the charter mandates that the mayor is bound to implement the requirements of the resolution, which Luttrell vetoed but which was sustained in an override vote by the commission. The case of the altered resolution has earned itself a place for “discussion” on the commission’s committee agenda for Wednesday.

And at some point, even should the independent-attorney issue be resolved in compromise, the original point of rupture between the contending branches of government remains — a suspicion on the part of the commission that the administration is playing fast and loose with the fiscal totals it issues and refusing to submit to regularly scheduled audits.

That issue was apparently at the root of Roland’s wish for the transfer of surplus monies to the commission’s contingency fund.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Time to Trickle Up

Despite decades of evidence that it doesn’t work, Republicans are still advocating for a trickle-down economy. You know their thinking: If we just get out of the way and let the magic job-creators do their sweet capitalism, unimpaired by all those government regulations and taxes, the money will flow down to the middle class like tips to Mitt Romney’s pool boy.

The latest manifestation came last week, when Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin signed a bill prohibiting cities across that state from establishing mandatory minimum wage and employee benefits, including vacation or sick leave days. Oklahoma City was trying to pass an ordinance raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10. Nope. Not going to happen, said GOP legislators. They contended that efforts to increase the minimum wage could potentially harm local business communities. So much for small government.

Tennessee, of course, is ahead of the curve on this road to nowhere, having passed similar legislation last year. Meanwhile, the income inequality gap just keeps getting bigger and the middle-class keeps shrinking. According to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office, raising the minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 to $10.10 would boost collective earnings by $31 billion for 33 million low-wage workers and lift an estimated 900,000 people out of poverty.

And what do you think those low-wage people will do with that extra $31 billion? They won’t be funneling it into off-shore investments. They won’t be stashing it in Swiss bank accounts or taking European vacations. They will spend it — on food, housing, appliances, maybe even a car. Many of them will move from subsistence living with government benefits to being able to enter the economy and inject it with fresh revenue. That means more money in circulation, money that will flow to businesses in need of customers. Call it “trickle up.”

A healthy, vibrant middle class has always been the cornerstone of the American economy. We’ve tried letting the rich get richer and waiting for it trickle down, and it hasn’t worked — except for the rich, who have indeed gotten much richer over the past three decades.

And here’s the thing, even $10.10 an hour isn’t a living wage. It’s $22,000 a year. But that’s better than $15,000 a year, your salary if you make $7.25 an hour. And no, most of those 33 million people earning minimum- or low-wage are not teenagers working at fast-food restaurants.

Now that the early presidential sweepstakes are heating up, the Republicans, even Romney, are making noises about fixing the income inequality problem. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell were on CBS’ 60 Minutes last weekend, saying they were all for improving the plight of the middle class — as long as we don’t, you know, actually raise the minimum wage. Or do anything other than continuing to sing the praises of a trickle-down economy.

The middle class is getting trickled-down on, all right. But it’s not with money.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Mortgaging the Future

My wife and I are one kid away from being empty nesters. Roman is a high school senior at White Station and looking at colleges, applying for aid, checking out scholarships, visiting schools, etc. Every day’s mail brings at least a dozen glossy pamphlets from schools all over the U.S. Amazingly, they are all challenging and inspirational places to learn, and absolutely life-changing for the students who go there. Every campus is beautiful; the students pictured are a careful blend of ethnicities; all the professors are top-notch.

And the cost to attend any of them is staggering.

Families of college-bound students are playing the biggest lottery in America. The winners get their tuition paid or maybe land a scholarship that covers most college expenses. The losers’ families — and/or the students themselves — take out loans they’ll be repaying for decades. In 2015, American students and former students owe an incredible $1.2 trillion in student loan debt.

It wasn’t always this way. Tuition at my university back in the 1970s was $700 a semester. Room and board was $1,100 a year. My parents were not wealthy and they had four kids. We were basically on our own to get through college. And you know what? It wasn’t that hard. I got a job at a fast-food joint; later, I drove a school bus. I worked summers in construction. When I graduated, I even had a little money in the bank.

Students can’t do that in 2015, not when tuition at many schools is higher than the average American’s yearly income. Higher education has become yet another contributor to income inequality in the U.S. There are the haves, who can afford (or have the income to secure loans) to go to “good” schools with $50,000 yearly tuition. And there are the have nots, who, unless they’re one of the talented and/or lucky ones who get a scholarship, go to community colleges or in-state schools where scholarship money is available.

I hasten to say that there is absolutely nothing wrong with going to an in-state public school or community college. I went to a state university. The point is that the options are limited for far too many bright and ambitious U.S. kids.

In October, Germany joined many other countries in Europe and eliminated university tuition, even for foreign students. If you live in one of these countries and are smart enough, you can go to college for free. Doesn’t matter how much your daddy makes.

President Obama’s proposal to make community college tuition free is a step in the right direction, though getting it through Congress will be a battle. In Europe, governments are ensuring that their best and brightest can get an education. They know that an educated citizenry benefits the economy. In the U.S., meanwhile, our students are mortgaging their futures, and borrowing money from the government — at this point, more than $1 trillion and counting — for the privilege of going to college.

Somebody’s doing it wrong.

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News News Feature

Silver Rights Movement

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who would have turned 86 last Thursday, once said: “Equality means dignity. And dignity demands a job and a paycheck that lasts through the week.”

Keep this in mind whenever you see nearly giddy news coverage about new jobs coming to the Memphis area — whether it’s 900 new Williams-Sonoma warehouse jobs just across the state line in Mississippi, 400 jobs added with Target’s new fulfillment center, or the 282 jobs expected after Graceland gets a new hotel.

“But dignity is also corroded by poverty, no matter how poetically we invest the humble with simple graces and charm. No worker can maintain his morale or sustain his spirit if in the market place his capacities are declared to be worthless to society,” King also said.

A living wage in Memphis is around $13 an hour. Average wages at Conduit Global, a call center that opened last year a mile from the nearest bus stop, are around $12. The base wage for Electrolux line workers is less than that.

Today’s hourly wages have the same purchasing power they did when Jimmy Carter was president. (That’s 1979, for those too young to remember.)

Thousands, if not millions of black people, “are poverty stricken — not because they are not working, but because they receive wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the main stream of the economic life of our nation,” King said.

In December, the unemployment rate fell to 5.6 percent, the lowest in six years. That sounds like good news, until you view it through the lens of history and race.

“According to the official statistics,” King wrote in February 1968, “Negro unemployment is twice that of whites.” Fifty years later, the gap remains. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, black unemployment in December was 10.4 percent.

To lure companies to town, city and county government regularly give out multimillion-dollar incentive packages. In the case of Graceland, the tax breaks amount to a staggering $141 million, or more than $440,000 in incentives per job created.

The message from big business and elected officials to the thousands of Memphians mired in low-wage jobs is clear: Be grateful for whatever you get.

Meanwhile, workers struggling to make ends meet have questions that the dealmakers and elected officials don’t answer. Will they offer a steady schedule so that a single mother (there are an estimated 43,000 single moms in Memphis) can be at home most weeknights to check her children’s homework and tuck them in?

Will these jobs come with health insurance (which is critical since Governor Haslam refuses to accept federal Medicaid expansion funds and instead is trying to create his own version of Obamacare)?

Will workers be able to earn sick days, so that catching a stubborn cold doesn’t mean forfeiting several days of pay or coming to work and spreading the germs to coworkers?

Are the job sites accessible by public transportation?

Do these jobs pay enough for a family to save for a rainy day, their children’s education, and their own retirement?

“What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t have enough money to buy a hamburger?” King asked. The business community’s argument has been that the wealth created for businesses eventually trickles down to the workers, although it’s workers’ labor that creates the wealth.

The Pew Research Center recently released a report showing that a rising tide doesn’t lift all boats, especially when the sailors are black and brown. “[E]ven as the economic recovery has begun to mend asset prices, not all households have benefited alike, and wealth inequality has widened along racial and ethnic lines,” wrote Pew researchers.

“The wealth of white households was 13 times the median wealth of black households in 2013, compared with eight times the wealth in 2010,” the report continues. “Likewise, the wealth of white households is now more than 10 times the wealth of Hispanic households, compared with nine times the wealth in 2010.”

To borrow from Operation Hope founder John Hope Bryant, the civil rights movement must give way to a “silver rights” movement.

Remember that King’s final and fatal mission to help striking sanitation workers was part of his quest for economic justice.

“Never forget that freedom is not something that must be demanded by the oppressor. It is something that must be demanded by the oppressed. If we are going to get equality, if we are going to get adequate wages, we are going to have to struggle for it.”

Are you ready to struggle?

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter From the Editor: Royal Baby Blues

How does it feel to be

One of the beautiful people?

Now that you know who you are

What do you want to be?

— “Baby, You’re a Rich Man,” The Beatles

In the blink of an eye, the nation flipped from obsessing over the George Zimmerman trial to going buggy over Britain’s royal baby bump. Didn’t we fight a war more than 200 years ago to assure that we wouldn’t have to care about this stuff? From the absolute wall-to-wall coverage the blue-blood-baby-birthin’ got in this country, I guess not.

As I write this, there are extremely serious amounts of money being bet on what the li’l prince will be named. I’m sort of leaning toward local sports-talker and writer Gary Parrish’s suggestion of Jamal. It has a nice ring to it and would break the predictable, waspy monotony of George, James, Andrew, Charles, Phillip, etc. I mean, it’s time to break that chain, yo. I also could live with The Prince Formerly Known As Baby.

We do know that little Royal Baby came into the world at around 8 pounds, which, at today’s exchange rate, is about $12.28, but he’s worth several million times that. This kid won the lottery just by being born. He will have an army of servants waiting on him hand-and-foot for his entire life. He will never know hunger or want. He will never need to look for work. His health care will be extraordinary.

In truth, there are thousands of babies born with similar advantages every day, here in the U.S. and around the world. The children of “1 percenters” are statistically highly unlikely to ever know economic distress. They are born set for life. And for some reason, whether they are born wealthy or become wealthy, the rich fascinate millions of people who aren’t rich. Why else would anyone pay attention to Paris Hilton or the Kardashians or any of the other vapid people staring at us from magazine covers in checkout lines? It’s fantasy, a way of vicariously living the life of the rich and famous.

But, as we all know and too often forget, there are millions of babies born poor and unknown, here and around the world, every day. And most of them will spend their lives that way — “set for life” in the wrong direction. In the U.S., income inequality has grown exponentially over the past three decades. Literally, the rich keep getting richer and the poor poorer. The middle class continues to shrink. And there doesn’t seem to be anything that can be done about it in the current political climate. It’s a royal pain, baby.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com