In June of 1964 I was a musician starting a gig at the Eden Roc, a very upscale nightclub in midtown Manhattan. The place had been closed for some time due to financial difficulties, and on that grand reopening night, with news camera crews stationed on the street outside, movie superstar and sex icon Jayne Mansfield was among the patrons in the club, along with a few mid-level celebrities: I recognized TV personality Durwood Kirby at one table and said hello to actor/comedian Red Buttons, whom I'd played drums for a few times at Grossinger's and other Borscht Belt venues. Three weeks later, the club closed for good and bankruptcy proceedings began. But in addition to three pretty decent weekly paychecks, I gained something quite unexpected from the job: a seemingly small, but retrospectively significant paradigm shift in my way of seeing the world.

Raised in a comfortably middle/professional class family of liberal political persuasions, at twenty years old I'd been flirting with some contrarian political leanings of a conservative nature. These melded my rural, agricultural and antiquarian predilections with rebellion against what I saw as the hypocrisies of the self-consciously intellectual, urban bourgeois milieu of my parents' existence. But at the Eden Roc nightclub, I got a glimpse of how the rich waste money: one night, a businessman hosted a little party in a corner of the joint for 20 or so friends or cronies. This was not a dinner party, merely an evening of drinks, with perhaps some hors d'oeuvres, and I should emphasize there was no floor show, just our trio of vibraphone, bass and drums. But the bill for the private party reputedly came to over $700 — in 1964 dollars, keep in mind. The businessman host was carried out unconscious. I naively thought maybe he'd fainted when he got the check! — in reality, he was simply too drunk to stand up or keep his eyes open.

You know what? I said to myself, the urban middle class may be wasteful and extravagant by my personal standards, but the rich — they're 100 times worse! My politics registered a small shift to the left at that moment, and have never since changed direction.

The bad news is that the distribution of income and accumulated wealth in 1964 America was positively egalitarian by present-day standards. The weekly Nation magazine for June 30, 2008 had a special issue providing some useful discussion and statistics on income and wealth inequality in the U.S. (additional figures from the January 5, 2009 issue):

In 2006, the average American CEO earned 364 times what the average worker made — the largest such gap in the world. The average annual income of the 20 highest-paid CEOs was $36 million. But even this is a pittance compared to the income of the top 25 hedge-fund managers, who in 2007 averaged $892 million each, with the top ten together earning $16.1 billion, which is more than the GDP of Nicaragua. Of course, we all know what an invaluable contribution hedge-fund managers make to the well-being of American society.

Overall, in 2006 the top .01 percent of Americans averaged 976 times the income of those in the bottom 90%. By comparison, from the early 1940s until the onslaught of the Reagan era, the ratio was consistently about 178. In terms of net worth (accumulated wealth), as of a year ago, the richest 1% held significantly more wealth than the poorest 90% (meaning the vast majority of us) combined.

Incidentally, based on 2005 figures, in the nearly 40 years since Martin Luther King was assassinated, the gap between median black and white annual income narrowed by just 3%. At this rate, we will reach racial income parity about the year 2542. The median net worth of black and Latino families is about 14% of that for whites. The law of diminishing returns is exquisitely applicable when it comes to income and wealth. Whereas the difference between, say, $40,000 a year and $80,000 for a family of four would likely bring a significant increase in security, recreation and cultural and educational opportunity, what does the difference between $960,000 and a million bring? What can anyone do with that kind of money? Here's one example: the Wall Street Journal estimates that the "casual wear" that a male hedge-funder might typically wear to work would include a pair of $365 shoes, $495 pants, a $315 shirt and other items totaling $1,570.

You might own ten cars, but can you drive them all at the same time and therefore multiply your pleasure accordingly? You might own seven houses, but that means that, wherever you're staying at the moment, you're gonna be homesick for six of them, assuming they really mean something to you. A $200 or $300 dinner at a famous restaurant is unlikely to be noticeably more delicious than a $30 or $40 meal at a merely excellent one, nor more satisfying than a good home-cooked meal, for that matter. In fact, the rich and especially the very rich are often pitifully self-deprived, using their wealth to insulate themselves from the great diversity of people and experiences that give true richness and depth to life. And what can be said of those amassing salaries in the multi-million range and accumulated wealth in the scores of millions or more? It is assuredly not about comfort and luxury and enjoying the finer things in life. It is all about ego and power and a sick triumphalism. It is about numbers. Its relationship to true happiness is likely to be inverse. Yet, this fawning in the presence of great monetary accumulation is the mindset that has driven American society, that permeates our culture and that is so often linked to militarism and mass repression abroad, and that has now brought us to ruin.

Income and wealth maldistribution affects us all, because it is fundamentally destructive of a sound and stable economy and corrosive to a sense of community, of shared sacrifice and shared prosperity. The last time income inequality came even near to 21st-century levels was — not coincidentally — in 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression. As Henry Ford acknowledged nearly 100 years ago, paying workers enough to be able to afford the products they manufacture is good for workers and for business.

None of these income and wealth swings comes by chance, or by some grand, preordained progression of history. They come as a result of changes in tax policy. From the Roosevelt era through the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, the tax rate on income in the very highest bracket was about 90%. In 2005, individual income of over one million a year was taxed at just 35%. But the real tax avoidance comes from laws and loopholes allowing the super rich to treat much of their earnings as capital gains, which are taxed at a measly 15%. Why should "unearned income" be taxed at less than half the top rate of ordinary "earned" income? The reduction and phaseout of the estate tax during Bush's first year in office was only the most blatant example of the rich being spared the tax burden borne by ordinary working people.

The dominant paradigm has been internalized and parroted even by those who should know better. Thus, Governor Patterson, who was once considered a progressive, not only rejected, but ridiculed, the idea of helping solve the state's budget woes by a surtax on millionaires (though hopefully, he may now have to go along with this plan, notwithstanding). Thus, McCain and his audience positively reviled Obama's reference to "spreading the wealth around," as if it was some traitorous obscenity instead of an established Christian precept. Thus, state lotteries across America design multi-million-dollar payouts that will disrupt and undoubtedly destroy the lives of the very few winners, rather than a multitude of, say, $250,000 payouts that might actually help improve the lot of a more significant number of winners. The presumed reason is that the huge payoffs are what generate ticket sales, and without them, sales would decline. But excuse me, would a decline in gambling be a bad thing?

The solutions are obvious. We need a radical return to a seriously progressive, loophole-free income tax and estate tax, even an outright tax on excess wealth, as is common in Europe. To quote one of the many specific remedies suggested in the Nation article: "We deny government contracts to firms that discriminate, in their employment practices, by race or gender. So why should we let our tax dollars go to firms that increase economic inequality? Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are flowing annually to companies that pay their CEOs more for a day's work than their workers make in a year....We could deny federal contracts or subsidies to companies that pay their top executives more than twenty-five times what their lowest-paid workers receive."

A radical reordering of the present income and wealth maldistribution would help our economy immensely, and might even do something for our national soul. Class warfare? That is the allegation the monied classes make, as they wag their collective finger at those who have the temerity to shed light on their depredations. Class warfare indeed! It's what's been waged by the rich on the rest of us since time immemorial. It's time we fought back.

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