Paul Buchheit

Are political and corporate leaders even remotely aware of the conditions of society beneath the wealthiest 10% or so?

Every clear-thinking American knows that education and jobs are needed more than armed guards in poor neighborhoods.

Free-market libertarians go to outrageous extremes to convince themselves and others of the infallibility of the market. Even when opposing evidence smacks them in the face, they conjure up sound bites that seem vaguely convincing but are in reality meaningless.

Congress and others who apparently don’t study the facts, believe that Social Security is a government handout. But ‘entitlement’ means that people who have paid into a program all their lives are entitled to a reasonable return on their investment.

As they accumulate more and more wealth, the very rich have less need for society. At the same time, they’ve convinced themselves that they made it on their own, and that contributing to societal needs is unfair to them.

The process is gradual, insidious, lethal. It starts with financial stress in various forms, and then, according to growing evidence, leads to health problems and shorter lives.

We already pay dearly for energy, medicine, banking, and telecommunications services. But a little research reveals that we’re paying more—much more—in a variety of ways that our business-friendly mainstream media won’t talk about.

Tax-avoiding, consumer-exploiting big business leaders are largely responsible for these abuses. Congress just lets it happen.

Some conservatives continue to claim that President Obama is unfriendly to business, but the facts show that the richest Americans and the biggest businesses have been the main – perhaps only – beneficiaries of the massive wealth gain over the past five years.

We may have once believed that the darkest days were behind us, and that slow and steady progress for middle-class workers would continue to be made. But greed and good sense are forever in competition.

Their entitlements can be summarized into four categories, each of which reveals clear advantages that the very rich take for granted.

There is currently no U.S. tax on the purchase of stocks, derivatives, and other financial instruments. The rest of us pay up to a 10 percent sales tax on the necessities of daily life.