Aristocracy on the Rise in U.S.

Gene Lyons writes:

One virtue of American-style capitalism is the way it has sustained democracy by transforming the lust for power into the quest for cash.

You don’t need to know much about the biographies of 19th century robber barons like John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie, for example, to be glad they stuck to commerce instead of politics. Not that the two are ever completely separate, but we’re better off with the control freaks in the counting house instead of the White House. This shouldn’t be read as a slap at the inheritors of great fortunes, like Arkansas Lt. Gov. Win Rockefeller, nor the universities, libraries, museums and hospitals founded in their names. But it’s worthwhile asking whether the truce between wealth and democracy in America isn’t breaking down as the tycoon class commands an ever greater share of the nation’s wealth and uses it to tilt the political system even further in its favor.

Based upon The New York Times’ recent first-rate series on social class in America, two things are happening: A small group reporter David Cay Johnston dubs the "hyper-rich" is making so much money and paying so little in taxes that the nation may be creating a permanent, European-style aristocracy. Meanwhile, social mobility stagnates and the security of the salaried classes looks increasingly threatened.

The numbers are pretty amazing. According to Johnston, also author of "Perfectly Legal," an incisive study of the U.S. tax code, the top one-10th of 1 percent of income earners, or the top one thousandth, saw their average incomes rise 250 percent between 1980 and 2002. Their share of the nation’s total income, he writes, "has more than doubled since 1980, to 7.4 percent in 2002. The share of income earned by the rest of the top 10 percent rose far less, and the share earned by the bottom 90 percent fell."

Read the entire piece here.