The Rich should be worried

The Rich is this country are doing well, unlike many of the rest of us. Many of us in the middle class suffer from lack of jobs, insecurity of future decent-paying jobs, and diminished prospects for us or our children. The working class has their prospects diminished too.

But it's the Rich who are moaning the loudest on some days. Perkins infamously wrote in the Wall Street Journal that he feared a Kristallnacht against the wealthy. To me, this seems like an overreaction and bitching about taxes going up on the wealthy, but those taxes still aren't terribly high. Romney paid only 14%, so a rise to 20% (the new capital gains rate) hardly seems like a major hardship.

I wish the Rich had more to worry about. The kings of financial firms should be sweating in non-country-club cells while federally appointed special masters hunt down and liquidate their assets. People are rightly pissed at the execs at Wall Street firms, GE and other huge companies that play the tax code like squash, energy giants like the Koch brothers, hedge fund managers and clients, and the foolish, spoiled rich like Sheldon Adelson who think they can buy elections.

People like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Apple execs, Oprah Winfrey, and George Lucas don't have anything to worry about. They created great things that we all enjoy, and got rich in an honest way. That's not true for the others. The GOP may have labeled them "job creators" but that's proved disgustingly hollow.

Americans aren't mobs, rebels, or robbers, yet some Rich are stupidly worried. The U.S. has never had a French Revolution-style uprising, much less one like the Russian Revolution. Even in the midst of the Great Depression, the poor continued to let the Rich be rich. Little Orphan Annie adored Daddy Warbucks instead of wanting to whack his head off, and that reflected the general population.

So why are the Rich so worried? I don't care. They have a lot more resources to slow or soften their fall than I do (as I have much more than the average American). If need be, I'll live on much less and I won't bellyache like these Rich.

We are all facing living with less. Why do the Rich think they have the brunt of it? Nothing could be further from the truth. So why the angst? In this column (and an earlier one) a leftish pundit tried to figure it out. This is what rang true to me:

It is that mix of insecurity, a sense of the brittleness of one's hold on wealth, power, privileges, combined with the reality of great wealth and power, that breeds a mix of aggressiveness and perceived embattlement. . .

But over the last few years (since 2008), I think there's been a pretty dramatic growth in what we'd call Tea Party politics in that set - extreme conservatism . . . the kind of feverish mindset in which you could write with a straight face that progressives might be building toward some sort of mass wealth confiscation or internment or even extermination.. . .

Image: bradblog.com

Extra. Wealth concentration is normal. No surprise that the powerful try to maintain their power.

Pity Bernanke and his difficult task

Have you ever walked into a situation with a bit of confidence and swagger, and THEN found out how bad it really was? As someone who occasionally has these crisis situations in my job, I can tell you that I dread these times. Maybe I'd like to hide under a rock, or wish it hadn't been my shift that day, but I have a job with responsibilities and I'll damn well perform as well as I can.

So I have sympathy for what Bernanke inherited. His job is to clean up after the biggest financial disaster since the 1929 Wall Street crash. Yes, he also contributed to the problems, but that doesn't make the task less staggering. In fact, I'm nearly dumbfounded just contemplating how huge a task it is. Anyone who pretends they have the absolutely correct answer to this problem is an unmitigated egotist, and I wish I could give such people a withering stare that would instantly deflate such pomposity.

So Bernanke has to deal with an overextended banking system that has many questionable loans and debtors who are facing lower and uncertain income. Naturally, he wishes for a soft landing, but we're past the point where that's possible. Instead, we mostly hope to avoid a full-on crash where the banking system and all private employment just freeze up. That part of the mission was accomplished with the help of the TARP.

The clean-up remains, as does the rebuilding. This is still very tricky, because the banking system still has scads of questionable loans and not-so-solid debtors.

I think Bernanke's choice of quantitative easing might have been the right one. Our banking system was an overstretched balloon that became untethered, flew around spewing out (actually destroying) trillions of dollars of assets. Maybe to stabilize the banks you have to do some partial reinflation. A bank has a better chance if it receives 80 cents on the dollar than if it receives 40. The strong debtors, who are paying back in full, rather have values rise to that 80% level than stay in cellar.

So I don't really believe that Bernanke has been pouring trillions of new dollars into the economy. He's only been replacing some of the destroyed trillions. Is this really true? What are the consequences? Um, um, let me cogitate some more. Or maybe I should just be forthright and say that I don't know if it's the right course, but it looks sensible to me (for the reasons I stated), and I haven't heard any other positions that were stronger. We'll have to see how it works out. And, of course, PRAY.

simplystatedbusiness.com