Let’s have a little experiment in logic, shall we?
- The wealthiest 1% of Americans hold 33% of the nation’s wealth.
- According to Romney, the 1% are “job creators.”
- With 33% of the nation’s wealth to work with, the 1% should have our economy producing jobs hand over fist.
The problem, of course, is that the economy isn’t producing jobs hand over fist. In fact, the economy has been in unsteady decline since the last major moves to put more wealth into the pockets of “job creators”—the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.
Clearly, the flaw in the Romney/Ryan logic is that the 1% are generally not job creators. They are, like Mr. Romney, generally inheritors of wealth and well-schooled, highly-skilled thieves.
“Thieves” may be the wrong word. Thievery is illegal; but we live under a system that makes certain kinds of thievery legal. As Bob Dylan puts it, “Steal a little and they put you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.”
Consider just one example of the 1%. Mitt Romney made $42 in 2011. There are approximately 8760 hours in a year. This means that Romney made $4,795 per hour, every hour of every day, waking or sleeping. But the fact is that nobody—not Romney, not Jack Welch, not the CEO of Goldman Sachs, not Lady Gaga, not the greatest poet who ever lived—is worth that kind of money. A system that allows people to acquire that kind of money is a system that privileges theft over productivity—and that is why we have a deficit of jobs.
We need a system that privileges productivity over theft; that makes it illegal to make $4,795 per hour, every hour of every day; that debunks the rhetoric of “job creators” in favor of reality—the reality that no nation can survive that allows 33% of its wealth to be held by 1% of its people.
We need a nation of, by, and for the people.
Where have I heard that before?