It first dawned on Sam Polk he might not deserve a $3.6 million bonus as a hedge fund trader when he realized he did not produce a product or provide a service. ARE KANSAS leaders addicted to wealth?
“I didn’t really do anything,” Polk said. “I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners.”
Polk confessed he had become addicted to making money.
In one year’s time on Wall Street he made more money than his mother during her entire career as a nurse practitioner.
Polk, 30, wrote of his addiction in a piece titled “For Love of Money” in Sunday’s New York Times.
“Only a wealth addict would feel justified in receiving $14 million in compensation — including an $8.5 million bonus — as the McDonald’s CEO, Don Thompson, did in 2012, when his company then published a brochure for its work force on how to survive on their low wages,” Polk wrote.
“Only a wealth addict would earn hundreds of millions as a hedge-fund manager, and then lobby to maintain a tax loophole that gave him a lower tax rate than his secretary.”
An article in Tuesday’s Register included a graphic showing the inequality of wealth in the world. Today, the top 1 percent has 65 times the wealth of the entire bottom half.
In the United States, the personal wealth of the top 1 percent has grown nearly 150 percent from 1980 to 2012. That small elite received 95 percent of the wealth created in the aftermath of the 2009 recession. During that same time period, 90 percent of Americans have become poorer.
We all know of those who lost their jobs during the recession and have since had to accept lower-paying jobs, or are still looking for work. Even now, five years later.
Many who were comfortably middle class, are now lower class.
The result is a destabilization of society.
And it is at work here in Kansas.
As a state we continue to marginalize a greater and greater number of our residents.
By not expanding our Medicaid program we are keeping a greater number of our poor desperately poor. By not raising our minimum wage we are pressing people into poverty. By keeping our schools underfunded, we are creating a disadvantaged demographic.
All are opportunities denied in order to finance tax breaks enjoyed primarily by the wealthy.
No, really.
By all evidence, legislation of recent years has gone predominately to reward the wealthy to the detriment of our schools, our hospitals, our elderly, our poor, and our rank-and-file employees.
Already our landscape is changing to where our youth are flocking to urban areas where better paying jobs and opportunities exist, leaving the rural areas to be home to the poor, elderly and undereducated.
How awful to think that could be the landscape of the future. Islands of prosperity amidst a greater expanse of poverty.
Right now, today, Kansas legislators have the opportunity to change the direction of our state.
While the Legislature is in session, contact your state senator and representative and tell him or her what’s important to you.
They need to know.
— Susan Lynn
leave rural Kansas out of the picture
