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February 4

Class warfare as corrective to financial inequity

The term "class warfare" is being advanced as a reprimand to those who point out the growing financial inequity in our society.

Well, I'm all for class warfare as a corrective. History reveals that, for most cultures, a divide will develop between a rich, powerful elite and a large, powerless underclass. Nobility and serfs. Dictators and underlings. Slave owners and slaves. Robber barons and the impoverished. Inevitably, lacking reform, such inequity leads to decline and collapse, or to revolution and bloodshed.

The billionaire Warren Buffet has warned us to counteract our own destructive unfairness, and some claim he's advocating a dreaded redistribution of wealth.

Hasn't the American way always been a kind of redistribution of wealth through mobility -- working, earning, buying, spending -- largely and broadly through our now vanishing middle class? What will happen when it's gone?

The concern here is about what actually constitutes a healthy economy, and about fair compensation for those who work to maintain it.

And so we learn that Mitt Romney's investments "earn" him more than $56,000 per day. Per day!

The Bush "temporary" tax cuts have been in place for about 11 years, and we don't see any jobs. I don't personally believe gadzillionaires create jobs. It's the middle class (and government).

I have an idea for Romney: Why doesn't he hire a few recent college graduates to identify, each week, two deserving small businesses that are struggling and award each a one day's share of his "earnings"? He'll be creating jobs and he can hire those graduates for peanuts, since they're also desperate. He'd still rake in the other five days, for a cool 280,000 bucks.

Abbott Meader, Oakland

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