It Matters

A great amount of wealth is built on the wages of the working poor. Take Wal-Mart, the largest employer in the Unites States. Each year four or five of the people on the Forbes magazine list of the twenty richest Americans are the children, nieces and nephews of the founder of Wal-Mart. Is it just coincidence that while prohibiting their employees from joining unions their family fortune is estimated to exceed $65 billion? While Wal-Mart makes benefits available, less than 50% of their employees can afford to participate thus the rest of the taxpayers subsidize their healthcare.   Though a lot of today's wealth is being made in the financial industry, by means that are mysterious to the average American and do not seem to involve much labor of any kind we all pay the price. All of those late fees, inflated interest rates, and exorbitant charges for low-balance checking accounts do not go to soup kitchens.   The super-rich bid up the price of goods that the ordinary American, the sub-rich, also need---housing, for example. Similarly the super-rich can absorb tuitions of $40,000 and up, making a college education increasingly a privilege of the upper classes.   Last and by all means not least, concentration of wealth at the top is routinely used to tilt the political process in favor of the wealthy.   The general attitude briefly put is as long as the middle class is still trudging along and the poor are not starving in the streets, what does it matter if the superrich are absorbing an ever-larger share of the national income? It matters. A bloated over class can drag down a society as surely as a swelling underclass.