Dividing Ourselves

IN EAST PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA, one in three school children is homeless. Poverty is pervasive. next door, in Palo Alto, the epicenter of silicon valley and home of Stanford University, tech industry millionaires live comfortably in gated communities. It is a two tiered society, the very rich and the very poor, and never the twain shall meet, a microcosm of the nation and indeed the world. the nine wealthiest digital tech billionaires in silicon valley have more combined wealth than nearly two billion of the world's poorest citizens, a quarter of the world's population. Will a single person eventually own all the wealth in the world? Crazy as that may seem, we are headed in precisely that direction, and unless current trends and economic systems are reversed, the already staggeringly polarized inequality will only worsen. The digital revolution, like the various industrial revolutions before, in which the steam engine and the railroad herded people in factories in slum ridden cities, is generating vast new wealth, but, like before, is concentrating it in the hands of the few, primarily due to the fact that economic systems have traditionally, and still do, permit the exploitation of labor and refrain from taxing the wealthy. digitally generated wealth, like before, is failing to "trickle down" to the rest of us. Whether this is fair, or natural is irrelevant to the fact that is is harmful to society because it sharply limits economic growth. What is relevant is that this arrangement, the traditional and the current arrangement, simply does not work for a healthy, capitalistic economy. The "fab five', Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have outspent Wall Street two to one in lobbying over the past ten years. this means that the digital revolution, like all other economic revolutions, is concentrating not only wealth but political power in the hands of an elite few. In a democratic society, regardless of disparity of wealth, political power should be equally distributed among we the people. The corporate rich have the power, and they use the political system to legislate economic policies which favor themselves, unsurprisingly. Economically, the more numerous the poor, the less the aggregate demand for the goods and services produced by the corporate producers like the fab five. Job creation and economic growth occur only when increased demand results, as it always does, in increased production. Demand precedes supply. Demand side economics, not supply side, is what works. getting money into the hands of the previously non consuming poor through progressive taxation is the catalyst to prosperity, not tax cuts for the corporations, which are already sitting on record amounts of cash. more money in the hands of the already wealthy does nothing to create new consumers, to expand the market. Trickle down economics is a sham, as all economists well know. the politicians know it too, but they prefer to legislate for their own good, not ours.