Hanauer concludes, “I can’t buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans can’t buy any new clothes or cars or enjoy any meals out. Or to make up for the decreasing consumption of the vast majority of American families that are barely squeaking by, buried by spiraling costs and trapped by stagnant or declining wages.”
Imagine walking into a classroom of kindergarteners and finding that just one kid is in possession of nearly all the toys. Just one kid has thousands of toy cars, army men, and building blocks piled up like Scrooge’s money bin, filling half the classroom; one or two of the kids have a dozen or so toys; and the rest of the class of kids have to share just one dinky, old rag doll. No one could possibly think that’s a healthy way of distributing toys to a kindergarten class. That one kid couldn’t even play with all his toys.
Would we call that kid a toy creator? Would we tell all the other kindergarteners that they can only play with toys when that one student decides to share them?
Of course not. Yet that’s exactly what we do with billionaires in our economy. Billionaires who can’t spend all the money they have, and are more and more reluctant to invest that money in their workers, their businesses, or their communities.
So what good are they?
It’s time to put in place a new wealth tax in America, one that prevents the accumulation of all wealth over $1 billion. If you can’t get by on $1,000 million, then you probably shouldn’t have access to that much money in the first place. There’s nobody who can’t make it on $1 billion. So any wealth over $1 billion, 100 percent of it goes to helping the rest of the country have a decent life.
That money can lift 49 million Americans out of poverty and move the 46 million Americans on food stamps into the middle class. They will—by the “invisible hand” of human instinct and need—better know how to spend the money and generate economic activity than the billionaire class, which currently has its excess trillions stashed in off-shore bank accounts.
This wealth tax would also break up giant monopolies and open up the market for small businesses. We shouldn’t rely just on the Bain Capitals and the Koch brothers to start or buy up new businesses. If the riches of the billionaire class were redistributed (a word progressives should embrace), then more and more Americans could have access to start-up capital and earn a living as entrepreneurs.
Trust me, the billionaires can spare it. The total wealth of the average American family is $57,000.188 Convert that into hundred-dollar bills, and it’s a stack about two inches tall. The one-percenters, at an income of around $300,000 a year, earn a stack every year that’s about a foot high. But the average wealth of the billionaires on the Forbes 400 list is $4.2 billion. Convert that into a stack of hundred-dollar bills and it would reach over two miles into the sky. It would be a navigation risk to aircraft.
It’s time to start funneling the riches produced by the American economy to the real job creators: working-class people who are spending money. And the best way to do that is to roll back the Bush and Reagan tax cuts, and reinstitute as much as a 90 percent top marginal income tax rate on the Royalists—where it was throughout the middle part of the twentieth century, America’s golden age of the middle class.
CHAPTER 14
Green Revolution
[F]or the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change… [T]he fact is the twelve hottest years on record have all come in the last fifteen. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods—all are now more frequent and more intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science—and act before it’s too late.
One of the biggest challenges we face when it comes to ending wars is what President Dwight D. Eisenhower termed the “military-industrial complex.”
When you drive out to the wealthy Virginia suburbs just a few miles from the Pentagon, you can find communities—both gated and open (but with private security patrolling the streets)—with mile after mile of mansions. Ten-, twenty-, thirty-bedroom affairs, with six- or ten-car garages, and a house in the back where the butlers, maids, cooks, nannies, gardeners, pool man, and other servants live.
These are the homes of the CEOs and senior executives and lobbyists for the military-industrial complex (which, since 9/11, has added “security” to its name). Missiles, drones, and tanks; nerve gas, weaponized anthrax, and biological weapons; nuclear bombs, X-ray body/truck/building scanners, and electronics to spy on everybody from the Chinese to you and me—all built these homes. And the people who live in them get richer and richer whenever we march off to war.
While there are—literally—millions of people who make their living off the war machine central to the American Empire, the really big bucks are concentrated in the hands of a few dozen corporations and their suppliers. That consolidation makes them very, very powerful when it comes time to decide how much money to spend with phony Astroturf “Citizens for a Better America” type of advertisements to either build up or tear down any particular member of Congress or candidate for president.
Similarly, our power industries are concentrated in only a few hundred hands nationwide. Hub-and-spoke centralized power generation is how this country started, with George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison competing to see who would ultimately build the giant power plants from which tendrils of high-tension lines would supply entire cities with electricity. (Westinghouse won the competition, by the way, because Edison stubbornly held on to direct current—DC—power when the advantages of alternating current—AC—were so manifold.)
So there is only one power line going into your home, and it’s coming from one power substation for your neighborhood, which is supplied by one giant power plant that’s feeding a large chunk of your town.
Grids and smart grids allow various power companies to share capacity and load, buying and selling electricity back and forth on the fly and by the second when necessary, but at the end of the day you and I write a check to one company.
That company is your local entry point into—or handcuff to—the power-industrial complex.
They like big. Big nuclear plants. Big coal plants. Big dams. Big oil- or gas-fired plants.
By keeping things centralized and big, they’re able to ensure they can always, forever and ever, skim a few dollars out of your wallet every day for your electricity.
Which is why it’s such a good idea to decentralize our power systems.
Decentralization
Big Power is jumping on Big Solar and Big Wind projects like there’s no tomorrow—they already have a business model that works for it. And to some extent this isn’t a bad thing: We have to make a transition from Big Coal and nuclear plants to something, and with the existing grid and distribution systems in place, these companies are ideally situated to be agents of that change.
But what happens when a critical mass of people figure out they can live, like my friend Hal Cohen, without ever having to send a penny to a power company?