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

Tirade Among the Traders - Time for Santelli to Go

Santelli Fans the Fires of Class Warfare

If CNBC wants to give Rick Santelli his own show where he can spend his time ranting in support of the bankers and wall street folks, that's just fine, but he should not be allowed to behave as he has in the guise of someone reporting the news from Wall Street.

To begin with he displayed a complete ignorance of the actual details of Obama's plan to do something about the mortgage meltdown and his tirade among the traders showed a man completely out of touch with the pain on main street.

President Obama has tried not to turn our nation's economic troubles into class warfare. It would be easy to do and completely counter productive. Santelli is fanning the embers and if the embers turn to flames, we'll all be burned.