Finding the Center - Reversing the Hollowing of the Political Center in America

This Week's View from Rattlesnake Ridge

"A serious and substantive discussion about lowering the voting age to 16 instead of 18 is also in order. Ten other countries now permit it. In Scotland the Parliament passed the franchise to vote for 16 and 17 year-olds unanimously after successfully testing the premise during their referendum on independence."

http://indepthnh.org/2018/03/18/finding-the-center-reversing-the-hollowing-of-the-political-center-in-america/

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A National American Social Dividend and a New American Paradigm

This week’s View from Rattlesnake Ridge Column at InDepthNH

Believe it or not, 1973 was the last year that wages for the Middle Class and the Precariat rose in response to increasing productivity. Since that time wages for both have stagnated while the real income of the top 1% has risen dramatically.

This growing income gap is the greatest threat to our democracy and our most important challenge as a Republic. Furthermore it is a virtual iceberg of sadness, rage and division within our society. Where most of the danger lies beneath the surface of the water. One need only observe that the margin of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 elections can be found in the number of people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 – desperately seeking hope – and then having found that still no one seemed to be listening – they voted to burn the system down by switching to Donald Trump.

This collapse and the growing disparity of income in America represents a grave and existential  danger to our Republic. The stability of a democracy is built on the strength of its middle class and the belief that even those in the Precariat can aspire to moving up …  the belief that if you work hard and play by the rules that every American has the opportunity to succeed. When people begin to lose faith in this the Republic is in peril.

Equally as important, though rarely observed, this disparity represents a nearly complete denial of what has contributed to an American economy that is second to no other in humanity’s history. The Gross Domestic Product of our nation is a complex synthesis of recent success and hard won achievement built over more than 500 years of history.

http://bit.ly/USA_Social_Dividend

Income Inequality - America’s Greatest Single Challenge in the Age of Technology

Wayne D. King

I believe that income inequality is the greatest single threat to our nation. If we do not begin to talk seriously about how we address this - and not the simplistic pablum that both Republicans and Democrats have fed us for the last 50 years - then the Republic is in grave danger. We will pinball from one ideologue on the right to one on the left.

"The world is shifting beneath our feet. Consider this:

1. Since 1973 wages and income for the bottom 99% of Americans have been stagnant. That means that every year growth in the economy is transferred directly into the bank accounts of 1% of the population.

2. The marginal costs of products move ever lower in response to enhanced productivity but that productivity is purchased by an unstoppable wave of technology displacing workers.

3. 94% of the jobs added to our economy since 2008 have been agency conntract part time jobs most without benefits and within the next 20 years 40-60% of all jobs that exist today will be replaced by technology.

4. For the first time in 100 years average American lifespans have gone down over the past decade. Some of this can be attributed to the Opiate crisis but a large share is the due to the fact that even a health club membership is out of reach for many Americans and expensive prescriptions are out of the question to many.  

I ask the same question that I asked in my column of January 1, 2018 ("A Steady Hand and an Open Heart" http://bit.ly/ASteadyHand) Who will buy the products when technology has replaced the human hands that once made them? To whom will those products be delivered when the trucks delivering them are driverless or they are flown through the air by drones? Where will we employ the taxi drivers, the line workers, the coal miners?"

Every American has contributed to the success of our economy for 500 years. We must find a way to share in those fruits in order to unleash a new entrepreneurial vision and spirit and to shrink the need for a safety net because more people are sharing in our economic success.

Next column: A National American Social Dividend and a New American Paradigm