Has the United States Become a Plutonomy?

A plutonomy, by definition, is an economy that is dominated by the very wealthy. Sometimes the word is synonymous with plutocracy, which means a rule by the very wealthy. To the rest of working class America, both words mean one thing: the very rich dominate the economy and control the rest of the nation by means of their wealth.

Does that sound not too good to be true? Consider the first motion Obama made as soon as he took the presidential office in January 2009. Bailing out bankrupt banks with taxpayer money is, well, un-Constitutional. Not only that, but the banks and car companies he did bail out - Citibank, AIG, Bank of America, Chrysler, General Motors, GMAC - used the majority of that bailout money to give bonuses to their executives, which prompted an outrage from Americans, and rightly so. As for the rest of the money, the banks donated it to the President's inauguration. Essentially it is robbing Paul to pay Peter, a modern day Robin Hood if you will, except that it is not the poor who is getting the handout here. Instead, it is the wealthy who are getting the handouts. The events of the corporate bailout is so well documented from 2009 by the media, that more and more people are becoming very critical of the "capitalism for the sake of capitalism" that drives corporations nowadays. Greed has taken over all other motives in business to the point where it has become more than unethical. Those banks whop received the bailout do not seem to really care if some employees are laid off in order to "save money" so that the top executives can receive that said money. Ditto for the car corporations. Then you have Bernie Madoff - well, we won't go there just yet since he is a white collar criminal, just like these corporate executives are (ponzi schemes really fall into a category of their own; it is not corporate, it is just criminal).Like I said, Obama's bailing these companies out is un-Constitutional, despite the fact he received back some of that tax money in the form of a campaign contribution. Talk about a major presidential failure. Obama should have thought of that (presidents can think? I thought most of them were puppet leaders) before giving these corporations bailout money. This is just aspect of a plutocracy, to be sure, but there are others, as well. Consider how the wealthy manage to remain wealthy.

The very wealthy in America - less than 5% - remain wealthy because they do not spend their money as much as the rest of us do, if we can afford it. Instead, they keep it in the bank, or tied up in stocks, annuities, and so on. The middle class has slowly eroded over the past several decades, widening the gap between the very rich and the very poor. Our entire economy has become dependent upon the wealthy, even though their money is not being distributed as well according to modern socialist standards. If the wealthy spend even less, then the economy is going to become stagnant and not grow at all. Back in the mid-1950's to early 1960's, the top income tax rate for the wealthiest in America was at 91%. Since then, the tax rate on the wealthiest became lower due to conservatives in the presidential office (right now it is at 35%, which is a considerably low tax rate for the very wealthy.) Even the famous comedian Ernie Kovacs, upon hearing he had to pay 91% of his income in tax to the IRS, did not fly very well with him, even though his late wife Edie Adams actually managed to pay those back taxes after her husband's untimely death. Well. It would be difficult to imagine Madoff, the CEO's of AIG, Bank of America, et al paying 91% of their income in taxes to the IRS, even if that tax rate for the six-figure and over salary did exist in 2010.

Assuming President Obama even knows how to read the history of tax gradations, would he actually sign into legislation such tax rates once again in the name of wealth redistribution? It is hard to say at this point. But again, that is still an involvement in business that really should not exist. The prevention of greed cannot be legislated anymore than greed itself. I am all for ending corporate welfare, since the federal government should not be getting involved in laissez-faire capitalism. Should a bank or car corporation fail, well, then it fails. In this case, it is not just the workers who are out of a job, but also the CEO's, CFO's, COO's, and so on. These executives clearly are not happy with all of the money and property they own. Yet even the poorest of poor could be happy eating a bowl of Spaghettios while watching Oprah Winfrey on television. Changing the plutonomy into a system that can really grow is going to take a lot of work, but will have to come from within the system, not without. Neither does the ideal system have to be socialist, nor that much dreaded communism that has long been a dirty word in the United States (a note on communism: in such a system everyone can be equally poor, but never equally wealthy. See the history of the Soviet Union on the social-economic-political dynamics of communism and human nature). That change will have to come about at some point while Obama is president, and let's hope he makes the right decision, and not the wrong one that could transform us into the Soviet States of America.

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/110258/us-economy-is-increasingly-tied-to-the-rich#mwpphu-container