Abstract

Taking the Offensive on Wealth

The article presents the author's argument that progressive liberals should work toward the redistribution of wealth in the U.S. It's time for progressives to launch a comprehensive challenge to America's extreme concentration of income and wealth. This is not only morally and economically right; a number of developments suggest that it is also one of the areas where progressives can aggressively take the political offensive. The top 1 percent now claim more income each year than the bottom 100 million Americans taken together. An only slightly larger elite group, the top 5 percent, own just under 70 percent of financial wealth and more than 80 percent of unincorporated business assets. At one level is the ever more obvious routine corruption among the wealthy--from the brokerage and insurance-industry insider deals and the $9 billion cooking of the books by Fannie Mae executives to the New York Stock Exchange's self-dealing arrangements and the Enron, WorldCom and other scandals. Progressives need to grasp fully, and then communicate, the morally outrageous nature of what is happening in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. The time is ripe for an all-out effort to demand change--and to force the other side to attempt to defend what is in fact indefensible.