The reality is that America's plutonomy is doing fabulously better than in 2007, while America's realonomy flounders along at rock bottom. The Great Recession hasn't meant so much the destruction of wealth as the transfer of wealth. The poor have gotten poorer and the rich have gotten richer, leaving the whole country right back where it was.
Except that the country as a whole is now even more unequal than it was in 2007.
We have to ask ourselves: how unequal should a country be? Was the America of 2007 really just too equal for our taste? Were there simply too few Bentleys on our roads in 2007?
Or was the America of 2007 already dangerously unequal -- in which case the America of 2013 is even worse?
Personally, I find it hard to believe that 2007 America was a dangerously equal communist worker's paradise. If you think that 2007 was about right, then you agree that we need to correct the country's income distribution to bring down our grotesque level of inequality. If you agree with me that America was already grotesquely unequal in 2007, then we have that much farther to go.
Should we have a Bentley tax? Perhaps not. But we should have a seriously progressive income tax that restores some sanity to our economy and our income distribution. Until we do, America will keep moving backwards as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
But then, we've been moving backwards for forty years now. Working Americans reached their highest income levels in 1973. We have a lot of lost ground to make up. As of 2013, we haven't even started. That more perfect union is going to be a long time coming.
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