I wrote this as a Facebook post a couple of days ago. In the writing of it, I remembered that writing more words than a typical Facebook post is something I used to do often. I used to post them here, and, a few times, try to get them published elsewhere with decidedly mixed results. But, hey, I have never written to get published. I've always written because it's the way I clarify my own thoughts. I am, of course, happy if anyone else reads the words, and all the more so if anyone else finds them clarifying. With those thoughts in mind, perhaps the New Year's Eve Facebook post will kickstart a more focused attempt to clarify thoughts more often. If I wind up doing that, I'll put them here mostly as a reminder to myself. But, hey, if you run across them here and find them clarifying, too, that's cool. Feel free to pass them along. Oh, and here's what I actually wrote on Facebook:
Here’s the thing that Bezos and his friends should know but cannot acknowledge. For more than 40 years they have systemically ripped off the commonwealth. Bezos also owns a little package delivery service you may have heard of called Amazon. They famously moved into our neighborhood recently, so you can consider this a friendly little neighbor-to-neighbor chat.
Bezos and his fellow American billionaires have seen their wealth grow by more than $1 trillion (that’s trillion, with a t) during the pandemic. Meanwhile, the nation’s GDP has declined by about eight percent or so since the beginning of the year, and fewer than half of the 22 million jobs lost in the first quarter of the pandemic have returned. Moody’s chief economist estimates that it will be 2024 before the job market recovers.
Since the late 1970s, the wealthiest Americans have simultaneously increased and consolidated wealth and power. They have used that power politically at every level to decrease their own tax burden, keep wages artificially low, and strip workers and their unions of bargaining power. That’s the tip of a huge iceberg of economic and political shifts that leave the U.S. economy profoundly less equal and more unjust than it was when I was a child.
It’s New Year’s Eve, and I’m not going to spend my time tracking down the data and footnoting it all, but I promise you, neighbor-to-neighbor, I’m not making up any of this. When I was growing up, it was possible for an average American family to get by and own a home on a single income. Lots of my friends’ families did so, and we were a decidedly middle class to working class crew of kids and neighborhoods. Most of us went to college, and few of us graduated in deep debt doing so.
Try doing that today. I dare you. Not you, Jeff. You probably own six homes and can just buy the university of your choice. But most of the rest of us? Not a chance. Even if you’re relatively well off – and we are doing fine – it’s pretty much inevitable that either you or your kids will wind up in substantial debt for their educations. Unless you have a spare quarter of a million, somebody is going to have to borrow some money if you want to put three kids through public universities on in-state tuition. I don’t need studies and footnotes on that one. We’ve got the tuition bills and bank records and credit card receipts.
So, while Jeff’s editors might be technically correct on the narrow policy question, in a broader sense they are missing the mark by as much as the Amazon delivery person who dropped one of our packages at the neighbor’s up the street.
That was occasion for some lovely neighborly Christmas cheer, so, thanks Jeff. You really have moved into a nice neighborhood. We’re not the kind of folks to build guillotines or carry pitch forks. But there are other parts of the country that are doing far less well, and may reasonably be inclined to be less polite. Before you go dismissing the idea of sending the peons a couple grand you might want to consider that.
