Last year for the first time in history someone paid $1.3 million for a penny!
This is evidence that while most of the country is struggling to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads, the super rich are able to splurge on meaningless luxuries.
The trickle down theory that justified the right's support for tax cuts to the rich, said that the rich would buy things that would generate jobs. How does luxuries like this penny or a 15 caret diamond soccer ball create any jobs?
Today social inequality is greater than it has ever been in the United States. That is a bad thing. Several studies have concluded that inequality kills.
http://baltimorechronicle.com/2006/03300...Almost every modern social and environmental problem - ill-health, lack of community life, violence, drugs, obesity, mental illness, long working hours, big prison populations - is more likely to occur in a less equal society. What surprises me the most is that the negative health affects both the rich and the poor in the society. See this article for a bunch of charts and graphs that illustrate this fact.
http://www.cognitionandculture.net/index...Researchers are still trying to figure out why this is true. Part of it is psychological. In an egalitarian society in which everyone feels equal to his neighbor, everyone is happier. In an unequal society there is much more stress. The poor may be starving, yet they can watch TV and see the lifestyles of the rich and famous, this creates a lot of stress and anger. Perhaps they worry more and get less sleep. Perhaps they relieve their stress by eating more.
The poor are angry that they bust their butts working two and three jobs and can barely get by yet they see hedge fund managers that can make a thousand times as much as they make all year, by simply making a phone call. The most valued people in our society, the teachers who guide our children into the future, and the police and firemen, who protect us and save our lives, are loosing their jobs. The super rich have more money than god, yet they don't seem to do anything to earn it. They don't produce anything, they don't create jobs, they are really pretty worthless to a society and may actually be harming it, yet they are rewarded thousands of times more than the people society depends on.
Many of the young and desperate see this basic unfairness and tell themselves that they also deserve a big car, nice clothes, and even a fancy house. They see that the old, work hard and pull yourself up by the boot straps myth, doesn't really work, so to get the luxury items seen as a sign of success, they turn to a life of crime, drugs, and violence.
Our best and our brightest see that the hedge fund managers and Wall Street traders are rewarded much more, so they go into these fields that don't benefit society, and there is a shortage of the engineers and scientists that do help society.
"Instead of working to develop renewable-energy technologies or more efficient transportation systems, they spend their days designing computer programs to swap one currency for another or inventing newfangled derivatives like the ones that blew up our economy".
"What the financial sector is supposed to do is serve the "real economy" - the part that produces goods and services we all need. Instead, Wall Street now dominates the rest of the economy. And big-time speculators are in the driver's seat. A small speculation tax would target these high-flyers, raising the cost of their risky activities enough to discourage the most dangerous behavior. For ordinary investors the costs would be negligible, like a tiny insurance fee against the crashes caused by speculators."
"The future health of the U.S. economy may very well depend on how we decide to pay for this crisis. It seems only fair that those most responsible for the mess should bear the bulk of the clean-up costs." See:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07...Our national Debt has been called the greatest threat to the country that our nation faces, and yet we are afraid to raise the top tax rates on the super rich from the 35% they now enjoy to the historic levels of 90% that we usually have during times of war (like now).
The Tax code has been the only way that we can encourage social equality. Now it seems that the physical health of the nation, as well as the economic health, and the national security, depends on our discouraging income disparity.
For the free market system to work, we need a fair reward system that rewards a hard day's work with a living wage. People that create no tangible benefits to society should not be rewarded thousands of times more than those that are critical for our survival. We need to change the tax code to reflect that.