Exactly what can unions help us accomplish that could reverse America’s continuing descent into a naked plutocracy? The Labor Institute’s Les Leopold recently outlined a core set of realizable demands that could “bring workers together and give them a sense of collective power.”
These demands range from prohibiting layoffs by corporations that collect taxpayer dollars and tax breaks to upping the hourly minimum wage to at least $20.
The current federal minimum — just $7.25 an hour — translates into an annual take-home of only $15,080 for a full-time worker, not nearly enough to keep a single mom or dad with kids above the official federal poverty line.
That official poverty line traces back to the mid-1960s work of Mollie Orshansky, a Social Security Administration economist. To arrive at that line, Orshansky multiplied the cost of a minimum food diet by three to cover all the other expenses a poor household might confront.
But the current federal poverty line hasn’t increased, to keep up with inflation, since 2009. That’s left minimum-wage workers today making 29 percent less — in real dollars — than minimum-wage workers earned at the time of that last increase and a stunning 40 percent less than minimum-wage workers earned back in 1968.
What has increased — and spectacularly so — since 1968? The fortunes — and power — of America’s richest.
“A handful of people,” notes the New Economics Foundation analyst Fernanda Balata, now “hold disproportionate influence over political outcomes and public discourse.” Enough influence to put coups on America’s political table.
How should we respond to that “disproportionate influence”? Balata spells out one intriguing possibility in a new paper the New Economics Foundation and Patriotic Millionaires International have just published. We need, her paper suggests, more than a poverty line. We need what amounts to an “extreme wealth line,” a framework for public policy that could help cap the fortunes of the world’s most fortunate.
Our globe’s current 10 wealthiest, Balata notes, “now own more than the poorest three billion combined.” These ten have become so rich, Oxfam relates, that they could lose 99 percent of their wealth and still rate as billionaires.
Nine of these top 10 billionaires just happen to be Americans. Affluents this rich, Balata lays out, are using their fortunes “to distort democratic foundations and the social contract, maintaining a system where they keep getting richer despite the consequences for the rest of us.”
Elon Musk’s coup has given those foundations their most significant shaking yet. Establishing an “extreme wealth line,” Balata’s work helps show, could start us down a road that could end that shaking, both today and deep into the future. This wealth line would essentially mark the point where wealth accumulations become a direct threat to our democratic, economic, and environmental future.
“By framing extreme wealth concentration as a societal risk, an extreme wealth line could reshape public opinion, as the poverty line transformed public understanding of economic deprivation,” Balata details. “An extreme wealth line could also provide a reference point for progressive taxation and regulatory reforms aimed at reducing excessive influence over public institutions and the media.”
Where might that extreme wealth line sit? In her research, Balata has interviewed a wide variety of policy analysts and deep pockets open to the wealth line notion.
The wealthy among those interviewed suggested specific setpoints for that wealth line, figures ranging from $10 million to $1 billion. The policy-minded interviewees, by contrast, saw more value in setting the wealth line in a relative context, by linking, for instance, poverty and wealth lines in a fixed ratio.
Taking that approach could reverse the incentives that drive so much of the behavior that our contemporary wealthy exhibit. Within our current economy and polity, our richest have an ongoing incentive to squeeze our poorest. The more they squeeze, the richer they can become. But a wealth line tied to the poverty line could reverse that dynamic.
Think about things this way: In a political system with a poverty line, tax-funded public assistance comes your way if your income sits you under that line or only slightly above it. If we linked that poverty line to a new extreme wealth line, new political dynamics would quickly come into play.
What sort of dynamics? The most affluent among us would suddenly have a vested personal interest in enhancing the incomes of our poorest. The reason? The wealth of our wealthiest would only rise if the incomes of our poorest rose first. We would be creating a society with an ongoing incentive to become ever more caring.
We can certainly stop the current Musk coup — if the mobilizing against it continues to build. The challenge then becomes figuring out what we can do to stop our wealthiest from mounting ever more robust coup attempts in the years ahead. Establishing an excessive wealth line, in the United States and worldwide, could be a giant step toward a Musk-free tomorrow, a future without a super rich.
