Dear editor,
Bernie Sanders has been talking about income equality all during this campaign year. He is right of course, there has always been income inequality but since the 1980s it has gotten worse. When 62 people own more wealth than 3.5 billion people it has swung too far. At the start of this decade, 388 billionaires owned as much wealth as half the world. And in 2016 it will be 62. In other words, in the last five years since the world recession, the very richest have grown inexorably wealthier. And that’s not because the global economy is booming, as every worker on pay freeze knows. It’s because we are living in a period of trickle-up economics, in which the working middle class have handed over money to those at the very top. The ’80s was the decade of trickle-down economics, with Reagan cutting taxes for the richest and promising that everyone else from Topeka to Portland, Maine, would soon feel the benefits. Reagan took 2.7 trillion from Social Security to make up for what he took from lost tax revenue. (Think highway funds.) The past half-decade has been about trickle-up economics, in which the powerful central banks have launched policies that have been about boosting the fortunes of the richest so they would create jobs. The disbursement of thousands of billions in quantitative easing was meant to raise asset prices of all the assets. Putting wealth from the middle class in the hands of the wealthy. It looks to me like QE: was the biggest redistribution of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the rich ever. If you follow this logic you can see what Brownback calls trickle-down is really trickle-up for his best friend in Wichita. How many jobs has Koch created?
Massive inequality has allowed the 1 percent to buy political influence as never before in history. Indeed, the super rich now practically write their own tax laws — Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, ALEC, Kansas Policy Institute — all backed heavily by the Koch brothers. They buy their own politicians as with the shadow-bankers who funded the conservative election campaign or the billionaire Koch brothers using their fortune to tip the U.S. presidential contest, as well as Kansas state elections, as we have seen with Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works.
Kansas has the most-disliked governor in the United States. That should tell you Kansans don’t like what’s going on in Topeka. Trickle-up economics has only been helping the rich Kansans and hurting the middle class. Come election time, things are going to change. Brownback has to be stopped and the only way to do that at this point is to change elected officials. If we see mailers from America for Prosperity or Freedom Works supporting them, you will know they are with Brownback, Merrick and Wagle. This is not the Republican Party I joined 50 years ago and with the poll numbers showing Brownback’s popularity, I am not the only one who feels this way.
David Comstock,
Colony, Kan.
