Jim Webb on class in America

By Heraclitus

There's a very interesting piece on The Wall Street Journal today by Jim Webb. I'm afraid I'm too exhausted to provide any meaningful comment, but here's a sampling:

The most important -- and unfortunately the least debated -- issue in politics today is our society's steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America's top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to fight our wars. They own most of our stocks, making the stock market an unreliable indicator of the economic health of working people. The top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.

Incestuous corporate boards regularly approve compensation packages for chief executives and others that are out of logic's range. As this newspaper has reported, the average CEO of a sizeable corporation makes more than $10 million a year, while the minimum wage for workers amounts to about $10,000 a year, and has not been raised in nearly a decade. When I graduated from college in the 1960s, the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker made. Today, that CEO makes 400 times as much.

Interesting for so many reasons, one of them being its implications for the question of whether the election was a move to the right or to the left. Webb clearly believes it was a move to the left, and intends to act on that belief. I am, as always, less than optimistic about what will actually be done, but Senator-elect Webb, at least, clearly has no use for the the idea that this election was a vote for centrism on social and economic policy.