Redistributing Up
30th December 2012
In the town that launched the War on Poverty 48 years ago, the poor are getting poorer despite the government’s help. And the rich are getting richer because of it.
The top 5 percent of households in Washington, D.C., made more than $500,000 on average last year, while the bottom 20 percent earned less than $9,500 – a ratio of 54 to 1.
That’s because the Crust pay themselves first, and very well indeed. They don’t really care what happens to the poor; that’s just rhetoric to fool the Great Unwashed into keeping them in power with ‘low-information’ voting.
The federal government does redistribute wealth down to struggling Americans. But in the years since President Lyndon Johnson took aim at poverty in his first State of the Union address, there has been an increasingly strong crosscurrent: The government is redistributing wealth up, too – especially in the nation’s capital.
The beneficiaries are not the billionaire financiers and celebrities who have come to personify income inequality in the 21st century. Yet the Washington elite are just as much part of the trend, having influenced laws and decisions that alter the entire country’s distribution of income.
Government doesn’t alleviate poverty — to the extent that there is a bureaucracy dedicated to alleviating poverty, they will strive to preserve poverty in order to safeguard their own jobs and perks.