Mostly it's because there's the very effective apparatus of corporate-controlled TV and print media, and rightwing think tanks etc., which continually hammer against any suggestion of egalitarian redistribution, and they've managed to convince a lot of people that it is somehow un-American.
But if you look at American history, you see a much different picture. It's just that this particular rightwing message has been pushed so very hard in the media in these last few decades. Also to be considered is the fact that race is always lurking behind most everything in American life. And 'redistribution,' in the minds of a lot of people, means taking money from people who look like me and giving it to people who don't look like me. So that represents a big difference between us and Europe: their redistributive efforts run into no such problem.
Conservatives regularly and consistently say that inequality doesn't matter, that if the affluent were less rich, it wouldn't really make a difference to people out there working for a living. But the truth is that to tax the upper 10-20% and use it to provide benefits to people lower down the scale, as the Europeans do, makes a big difference. It can even make an enormous difference: Even taking a few percent of national income away from the top 1-to-5% and direct it towards the bottom 20% -- that makes for a tremendous gain in the quality of life for the bottom 20%. It does so in Europe, and it could well do so here.
For example, consider healthcare reform. As Krugman told Moyers, it's financed in large part with small surtaxes on high incomes. A lot of the money that is paying for health care is coming from additional taxes on investment income, which is an additional tax on very high earners. And that is going to give everybody in America the guarantee of being able to have essential, basic health insurance at an affordable cost. And that represents a huge improvement in many people's lives. So a little bit of Robin Hoodism can do a lot. And if there were the political will, we in the US could do a lot more of it. Could we do major redistribution in a way that makes this a significantly better society all around? Yes we could, replies Krugman.
We can't give up hope on these things. Look at the American political tradition. One of the most interesting things Piketty points out is that serious progressive taxation of high incomes and great wealth is an American invention: We invented it -- and we invented it in the early 20th century, right at the peak of our Gilded Age. Somehow we found political leaders like Teddy Roosevelt, who were willing to say to our budding "Gilded Age": "This is a bad thing, we do not want the society that seems to be emerging here." So yes things can change for the better.
So what's it going to take to change this situation?
A mass uprising? Consistent demonstrations? Insurgent politics? Specifically, how are we going to stem the tide that Piketty says is taking us into a permanently entrenched oligarchy and the end of democracy?
There's a negative answer as well as a positive one. Piketty seems to argue through much of the book that we only escaped the old oligarchy for a while, thanks (oddly enough) to really disastrous events like a war and a depression, which disrupted the 'normal' development of oligarchy and dynastic wealth accumulation.
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