U.S. Must Tackle Gap Between Rich, Poor

A decent nation does not scoff at its poor. A prudent nation is skeptical, at least, of politics that hold that the best thing to do for the poor is to beat on them until they get the message to stop being poor.

Even to bring such matters up these days is to be suspected - and usually to be accused - of practicing class warfare, of defaming capitalism and of inciting a takefrom-the-rich greed among the gimme poor.

But the disturbing fact is there nonetheless: The gap between rich and poor is wider in the United States than in any other industrial nation. We’ve replaced Britain as the leader in this dismal contest.

We will fail to attend to this inequity at our certain peril.

The top 1 percent of U.S. households own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth; the top one-fifth owns 80 percent. The lowest-earning fifth takes in only 5.7 percent of the after-tax income and has virtually no assets.

Argue about the whys and the so-whats, but the numbers remain. This is arithmetic, not politics, and the data come from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve, straight arrows both.

The gap began widening in the ‘70s, grew faster in the ‘80s, still is growing now and will widen even more if new congressional policies prevail that pinch public services and support for the poor and for low-wage workers and redistribute the savings to the well-off.

Some of the gap can be laid to a laggard minimum wage and, despite all the caterwauling about a run-amok “welfare state,” to public assistance at the economic margins that is less than that provided by other comparably rich nations.

Private-sector behavior also is involved. Japanese companies, on average, pay their top management 10 times more than their workers; U.S. companies pay about 25 times more.

The United States, too, simply may be ahead of an evolving worldwide trend, as high-skill workers are paid generously and low-skill work is devalued.

What the problem is surely not is a slothful underclass.

Forget all that country-club blather about unanswered job ads. Few people in the ghettos are lapsed sales reps, dental hygienists and so on.

Burger-mongering may go begging at twice the minimum wage in the suburbs because our poor are so remote and socially isolated that most of them don’t know about those jobs and can’t get to them if they do. But in poor neighborhoods, applicants line up even for minimum-wage jobs.

It is a special cruelty under these circumstances to abuse the poor with their own poverty, citing their very plight as proof of their worthlessness, which is the fashion these days.

A decent nation does not scoff at its poor. A prudent nation is skeptical, at least, of politics that hold - to the convenience of the well-off, as it happens - that the best thing to do for the poor is to beat on them until they get the message to stop being poor.

It’s less clear what a wise nation does.

First, it must care. At a minimum, it must see the lock step between income and education and intervene with whatever resources and tenacity it takes to get the poor up to educational speed, no excuses allowed.

A wise nation, in any event, understands that a worsening - and apparently hardening - inequity is not a friend of its prosperous and is the deadly enemy of its best future.

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