The have lots, the have some and the have little

Things must be great in America! The NYSE has reached a new high for the last six days in a row, something that had never been done before. From a low down in the 6000's a couple of years ago, it has rebounded to a new stratosphere, reaching over 14,500 yesterday and still going up. And Standard and Poor's is closing in on a record high too.

But that is just a mirage for most of us and a reality for only a few. It makes us feel good about the economy when the stock market goes up but most of us don't profit from it directly. The top 1 percent of Americans own half of the country's stocks, bonds, and mutual funds whereas the bottom 50 percent own only 0.5 percent of these investments, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. On the flip side, sociologist William Domhoff points out that the top 1 percent have only 5 percent of the nation's personal debt while the bottom 90 percent have 73 percent of total debt. The top 1 percent also own 50 percent of the nation's wealth whereas the bottom 80 percent owns only 7 percent.

Doing the research for this column literally boggled my mind in terms of the economic disparity between social classes and especially between the upper class and the rapidly dwindling middle class.

According to William Falk, corporate profits are soaring and companies have piled up a record $1.4 trillion in available cash. The New York Times this past week called it "a golden age" for corporate profits. Since 2008, corporate earnings have risen 20 percent a year while worker salaries have been flat. Even when companies expand, they don't hire new workers. For example, United Technologies has raised its annual revenues by $15 billion since 2005 but cut 4000 workers last year and will cut 3,000 more this year.

According to Dr. Jack Rasmus, in 1979 the American worker's average hourly wage was equal to $15.91 (adjusted for inflation in 2001 dollars) and by 1989 it had reached only $16.63 an hour. That's a gain of only 7 cents a year for the entire Reagan decade. And as bad as that was, the situation was worse for workers who had no college degree and that's 72.1 percent of the workforce. For them their average real hourly wages were less at the end of 2000 than they were in 1979. And since 2000 their wages have continued to slide even further.

On the other hand, the direct compensation of CEO's from 1989 to 2000 increased by 342 percent. Put in real terms, the median pay for an American CEO was $2,439,000 in 1989, $10, 775,000 by 2000 and much higher than that today, accelerating at a pace never seen before in American business. In 1965, a CEO's pay was 26 times that of their average worker, in 1980 it was 40 times, in 1990 it was 72 times, in 2000 it was 310 times and today, according to the accounting firm Towers Perrin, it has reached 500 times.

I know these are a lot of numbers to digest but I put them out there for you to read because they're REAL numbers. These are the facts when you compare corporate CEO's with their average workers who are doing all the heavy lifting. The discrepancy between top and bottom grows more each year, at a time when politicians are talking about cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits for the people who need them the most but protecting the 1 percent of the nation's wealthiest people by refusing to even discuss raising their taxes.

America has always been known as a country of mobility. We learned in school and we taught our children that anyone can be anything if you just set your mind to it. But that chance for upward mobility is rapidly disappearing. We now have what many economists call a permanent underclass with little or no hope of ever escaping the position they're in now.

In total salary from two separate income sources, I now make around $80,000 a year and in McCook, where living expenses are relatively low, that's a pretty good salary. But in terms of buying power and real money, I'm not a whole lot better off than I was when I hired on the Tulsa Police Department for $440 a month. I lived in a high rise apartment building in the middle of downtown Tulsa, drove a Corvette, took a couple of vacations a year and always had money left over, just like I do now.

So the rich get richer and the rest get less but somehow we're supposed to feel sorry for the rich because they're the lifeblood of the American economic system and are job creators. Except they no longer create jobs. They pad their own bottom line while they lay people off because technology is now being used to increase profits instead of workers.

During the Reagan Administration, a phrase was coined called trickle-down economics. If the people at the top were making enough money, it was supposed to eventually trickle down to everybody else. It didn't work then, it hasn't worked since and it sure isn't working now.

And for the most part, politics is to blame because the rich continue to be protected while the rest of us must fend for ourselves.