It was fifteen years ago that I wrote one of my first pieces on economic inequality in this country, and since then that inequality has soared on an exponential basis.
It is no longer the millionaire next door; it’s the billionaire—and now, with Elon Musk’s potential pay package, the trillionaire next door. That’s larger than most countries’ gross national product. That earlier piece was about a book I published years ago, Herbert Inhaber’s and Sidney Carroll’s How Rich Is Too Rich, and although its focus was on the inheritance tax (or lack of it), its ingenious first chapter vividly depicts the parabolic rise of wealth in our population in the form of a parade—each marcher’s size proportional to their income. Imagine what that parade would look like today.
Back then I pointed to the policies of the Tea Party. How quaint that Party now seems next to the present Republican Party of plutocrats, whose leader even held an extravagant Halloween Great Gatsby celebration at Moolah-Lago—as millions of Americans lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. It’s hard to accept that as “coincidence.” It is abject cruelty. Meanwhile, ICE roams the nation, snatching people of color it thinks may be illegal immigrants—under the guise that all such people are violent criminals, their families be damned. This is heartbreakingly captured by Mike Luckovich in a recent political cartoon in the Atlanta Constitution.
This especially hit home last Thursday. I was playing tennis, still recovering from my injury, and as I looked up to serve, I stopped: overhead was a low-flying C-17 Globemaster, a hulking military transport. Were we being invaded? Well, yes—in a sense. The tennis courts happen to sit on that particular plane’s low glide path into Palm Beach International Airport. And since it was Thursday morning, I knew what it meant: another weekend visit by our President, come to play golf and consort with the rich and famous and—with his steady stream of pardons for those who helped make J6 a reality or enriched themselves with crypto duplicity—the infamous as well. That transport carries “the Beast”—his armored car—as well as other security vehicles, devices, and, who knows, his favorite golf clubs.
We were once a country of compassion. Our tax laws have always been open to debate, but never before have they been so one-sided—or the government run so shamelessly as a personal plaything. It makes you wonder who will prevail at Sotheby’s impending auction of “America” AKA the Golden Toilet Bowl (Maurizio Cattelan, “America” --ca. 2016) reportedly being sold by billionaire Steve Cohen (also NY Mets owner). Perhaps it will be won by an absentee bid, destined for the Classified Documents bathroom.
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