It's the customers, stupid

This separation of wealth issue has been troubling for longer than the current situation.  As far back as the sixties when I learned the salaries of people in Congress, I wondered how someone who makes $200,000 year could possibly relate to and represent someone who makes much less.  As it turns out not very well, considering the gap has grown since then as fewer people accumulate more of the country's wealth while the rest of us find our meager salaries (relative to the 1%) have less and less buying power. 

Almost immediately when it came around, I realized what a crock trickle-down economics was.  The country survived it, but today it is worse than ever.  I chose a path that didn't emphasize accumulation of wealth (ha, that part of it worked) so, some of my complaints could be difficult to defend, but still I am not the only one this issue troubles.  Now it has reached a point where only one or two percent of Americans control the lion's share of the country's wealth.  What is new is the attacks on working people and the poor although as far back as Jean Paul Marat, who said the poor will always be poor, it has been the norm.

Public employees, unions, people on welfare, or too ill and poor to afford health care are actually targets.  All this has been hashed over and over so there's no reason to grind it up again here.

What's new is another facet of a failing economy that came to mind while on a long drive the other day. As fewer and fewer people gain more and more of the wealth and the less fortunate have to scratch to survive, that seems to be a deadly facet of the current situation because an economy succeeds on the basis of some people making things and some people buying things.  As the separation grows, there are fewer and fewer consumers to buy the products that keep the economy rolling.  Demand drops, product makers lay off more workers and the problem mushrooms as more and more people join the ranks of non-consumers.

The purchasing by one or two percent of the population cannot sustain the economy.  I mean, you can only buy so much stuff no matter how much money you have.  So, Mitt Romney has so many houses he couldn't even remember what state was his legal residence when he ran for governor of Massachusetts.  Sure the construction and upkeep of those houses employs a few people, but the sustained jobs are at minimum wage.  The Walton family gains immense wealth, but their own employees can't afford to shop even in their cheap stores without the help of food stamps.  One day we are going to wake up and there will be nobody to buy stuff except the misers who only buy money and then hide it in the Bahamas and Switzerland.  The silliest example I can think of is porn star Jenna Jamison came out to support Romney because he doesn't want to tax the rich and she is rich.  Is this one of the few cases in modern times where the rich got screwed?

As one pundit has put it recently, it isn't the rich who keep business buzzing along, it is the customers.  And now, the people most dependent on customers are killing them off.  All of it sounds like economic suicide.

So what do we do?  I went through the couch cushions to see if I could find enough change to buy "The Hunger Games" DVD that was released today. Just doing my part to keep buying stuff and the economy rolling along. But in the movie, did I see the seeds of change?