Robert Reich on American economic inequality: Note for a lecture, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

Note: In my presentation, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United?" I suggest that the gap between the very rich in the U.S. and "the rest" of Americans -- an economic development which has marked recent decades -- does not contribute to American political or social unity. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that the American economy, for all its inequalities, is a powerful engine of American unity: For a rather mundane reason -- We want to make money in this country, and we can't do that without communicating with one another or, to use the popular word among the younger generation, "networking" -- which bring us Americans together (granted, on a not particular profound level from a human/humane perspective).A perfect example of that would be a business convention in Las Vegas. Coolidge was not that wrong: "The business of American is business."

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Robert Reich on Facebook

Today I took part at a "fight for 15" rally for workers at a McDonalds in Oakland, California, where a striking worker -- a 35-year-old mother -- told me she worked all hours but still had to rely on public assistance because McDonalds doesn't pay enough to lift her and her family out of poverty.

Connect the dots: (1) Big corporations have parked over $1.5 trillion of their profits abroad, to avoid U.S. taxes. (2) Corporate tax rates in the U.S. are lower than they've been in seventy years. (3) American corporations are furiously lobbying for even lower taxes. (4) They're also fighting efforts to raise the minimum wage. Meanwhile: (5) Giant companies like Walmart and McDonalds don't pay their employees enough to get out of poverty. (6) Which means those employees have to rely on food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance. (7) Which are financed through our tax payments. (8) So, even as Walmart, McDonalds, and other big companies to everything possible to reduce their taxes and fight against raising the minimum wage, and refuse to pay their workers a living wage, you and I are subsidizing their low wages through our own tax payments in order to prevent millions of Americans from falling into poverty.

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