#882 Voter Charge

In the last decade, American wealth has concentrated in the hands of a very few people at the top of the economic spectrum.
You might say it’s been redistributed up there.
Taxation laws, loopholes and tax credits have made it possible for the enormously wealthy to get even more enormously wealthy. It’s true that the recent stock market crash has cut that wealth in half for many of these folks.
But they are still enormously wealthy, and not in any danger of losing more than three and a half of their seven homes.
Our economy goes through cycles. Many of those wealthy are now supporting Obama because they know this. They know they’ll make money off this next cycle as well. The next cycle will be more middle-class oriented. The middle-class, when it has money to spend, is the salvation of capitalism.
Marx’s predictions of the downfall of capitalism would have come true if the evil money barons of the 1800s had continued to starve their workers and treat them inhumanely with 16-hour workdays and child labor and sweatshops and all that.
Instead, unionization forced them to pay their laborers a little more and—voila—the middle class was born and became a consumer class. Laborers became customers for the capitalists’ products.
Those customers now need to get tax breaks of their own to prime the economic pump again.
As a testimony to the combined financial power of the middle class, the Obama campaign has earned more money than any campaign in history. And it’s done it mostly with 25 and 50 dollar contributions from the little guy.
“Bubble up” economics seems to work a lot better than “trickle down.” Especially when the trickle down doesn’t happen and gets outsourced overseas.
But here’s the biggest irony. In a time when the credit markets are frozen up, when banks won’t lend to each other because they don’t trust each other, the Obama campaign triumphed with millions of small contributions sent by little guys.
How did they send that money?
With their credit cards.
A testimony to the real American way—
If you want it, charge it!
America, ya gotta love it.