Transgenerational Financial Terrorism

Surprisingly few Americans are worried about the nation's fast-weakening financial condition, or even about our fast-widening economic divide. Yet one must wonder if this lack of concern is by design as, over the past two decades, laws favoring community-based broadcasting were repealed. As broadcasters merged, broadcasting ("the oxygen of democracy") consolidated, along with the range of available viewpoints.

Texas-based Clear Channel now owns 1,225 radio stations and syndicates programming to 7800 broadcasters, enabling hard-right radio icon Rush Limbaugh to dominate the nation's drive-time eardrums while crowding out other perspectives like nothing seen since the fall of the Soviet Union. With support from both major political parties, Americans find themselves immersed in a media environment where it's all but impossible to learn the real facts about the perilous state of their nation.

Media consolidation helps obscure the gross mismanagement of the nation's financial affairs as both parties embraced the University of Chicago's "neoliberal" economic model. As the 1980s began, the national debt was already a hefty $909 billion. After 20 years of leadership by two like-minded, neoliberal-inclined parties, that debt -- our debt -- is on track to reach $7384 billion by September 2004. In a 2003 survey on transgenerational accounting, economists working for the U.S. Treasury identify $43 trillion in unfunded government liabilities.

At every turn, this expanding liability -- our liability -- was used to expand the wealth of the already-wealthy. In 1981, while I served as counsel to the Senate Finance Committee, Republicans Reagan and Bush proposed supply-side investment subsidies enacted at a fiscal cost of $872 billion, every cent deficit-financed. In the mid-90s, Democrats Clinton and Gore enacted a similar investment subsidy at a fiscal cost of $268 billion, also totally deficit-financed.

Both the debt and the interest owed on that debt are backed by our full faith and credit. Interest payments -- received by just four percent of U.S. taxpayers -- grew from $58.5 billion in 1980 to $247.5 billion by 2000. Combine our interest payments with investment subsidies paid for with our debt and what's the result? In 1982, when the supply-side subsidies first became law, Forbes required $91 million for inclusion on its list of the nation's 400 richest. The average wealth of those listed was then $200 million. By 1986, average wealth topped $500 million.

By the close of the Clinton era, $725 million was required just to make the list (versus an inflation-adjusted $161 million). Average wealth by 2000 topped $1.4 billion as, from 1998 to 2000, the wealth of this politically favored few grew an average $1.9 million per day.

That's $240,000 dollars per hour, or 46,602 times the minimum wage. Good work if you can get it. Or if you can lease the loyalties of lawmakers willing to work at passing laws that get it for you, sticking us with the fiscal tab for policies that swelled the ranks of billionaires from 13 in 1982 to 274 by 2000, all the while crowding out the fiscal resources needed for healthcare, education, foreign aid, intelligence-gathering, environmental clean-up and such.

We Get The Mortgage, They Got The House

From 1992 to 2000, the income of the top 400 taxpayers grew at 15 times the rate of the bottom 90 percent. By 2000, America's deficit-subsidized few were pocketing an average annual income of $174 million ($87,000 per hour), nearly quadruple their $46.8 million average in 1992. At every turn, both parties piled on more debt to build more wealth and more income for ever fewer Americans, particularly those who contribute to their political campaigns (only 0.25 percent of us give more than $200 in an election cycle).