Commonweal magazine recently published the first in a series of articles by David Carroll Cochran, professor of politics and director of the Archbishop Kucera Center at Dubuque’s Loras College, that will appear during the 2012 presidential campaign. It presents an economics catalogue that appears increasingly often in the media. But for the first time I have seen, someone calls the contents foreign to Catholic social justice teaching.
Between 1980 and the present, “. . . the richest 1 percent of U.S. households saw their incomes rise 260 percent (compared with 14 percent of the bottom 60 percent), more than doubling their share of the national income, until by 2007 this top 1 percent earned more than all 150 million in the bottom 50 percent combined. In the six-year expansion that led up to the 2008 crash, the same top 1 percent saw its income rise by 10 percent a year, while median family income actually declined, and poverty increased –the first time in U.S. history it has done so during an expansion. This rise in poverty occurred as corporate CEO compensation ballooned from 24 times the average worker’s wage to 300 times (italics in original) that amount. Just six members of the Walton family, whose patriarch founded Walmart, now have as much wealth as the bottom 30 percent of the entire U.S. population.”
Some readers will instinctively call this class warfare, pitting the envious poor against the deserving rich who worked and earned their prosperity. Since Karl Marx tried to incite class warfare in order to stir up the proletariat to throw off its chains, they will charge Marxism/socialism/communism.
Of course, once this charge is leveled at anyone, even Santa Claus for wearing a red suit, the accused is infallibly guilty. Ask Sen. Joseph McCarthy or the House Un-American Activities Committee. Such critics may well belong to the bottom 60 percent. Statistically that is very likely. They will credit admiringly those who have the status symbols of wealth with having accomplished what they hope to accomplish even if told some of those, for instance the sellers of corrupt Wall Street derivatives, are directly responsible for the Great Recession. This is because they have the ardent hope of joining their ranks.
It is not just admiration from a distance. Inexplicably many millions will vote to further insulate the top 1 percent, no doubt thinking this will accelerate their own rise to the top. They will clamor for fewer regulations in life, seldom specifying which ones they mean. The 1 percent means something very different when it uses this term. It would like to deregulate the already toothless guard-dogs of government, like the Securities and Exchange Commission. But in the face of such intentional neglect to specify which regulations should be ended, a cowardly Congress caves in.
Consider how we choose congressional representatives. From the moment they assume office, they have no alternative but to seek reelection funds. Since it is easier to get a lot of money from a few people than from many, they attract the attention of the unprincipled well-off. Their political contributions are mere write-offs, business expenses to grease the wheels. Ordinary middle-class citizens have less means to donate to political officeholders, so they have far less pull. And with our current electoral habits and mores, a ham sandwich can get elected with enough ads, leaflets, TV and radio barrages, robo-calls and junk-mailings. These are all it takes to sway gullible voters who refuse to critically examine candidates. All one has to do is look at the elected victors on every level in most places.
Cochran continues, “More than a century of Catholic social doctrine, drawn together in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church and expressed most recently in Benedict XVI’s Caritas in veritate, provide some basic standards. In the words of John Paul II, the ‘first principle of the whole ethical and social order’ is that of the ‘universal destination of goods,’ which requires that all persons have access to sufficient goods to live in dignity and develop to their full potential.”
This means in plain English progressive taxation, taking more from those who have more since the evidence is that those with more got more with the help of those with less. Candidates brag that they have cut the taxes of the rich, and few of the non-rich object. Probably more of that wishful thinking that pulling for the rich will make one rich. Experience shows otherwise.
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