MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

(Photo: Mike Mozart)

A 2012 article in Mother Jones identified a shocking example of economic equality in the United States:

As Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute points out, the six Walmart heirs now have more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined, up from 30 percent in 2007. Between 2007 and 2010, the collective wealth of the six richest Waltons rose from $73 billion to $90 billion, while the wealth of the average American declined from $126,000 to $77,000 (13 million Americans have negative net worth).

Of course, what makes this statistic even more vexing is that as the income divide increases, it increases the perceived need for people with extremely limited incomes to buy at Walmart - or comparable stores that carry inexpensive consumer goods primarily made overseas. As BuzzFlash at Truthout has pointed out before, this is the "self-cannibalization" effect on the US worker who has lost his or her job to manufacturing being moved overseas to nations where rock-bottom wages are the norm. Replacement jobs at minimum wage, if they can be found, then leave the workers with just enough funds to buy goods that used to be made in the US and, therefore, increase the fortune of the Walmart heirs.

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According to a recent BloomburgBusiness article that focused on just one Walmart heir: “At the current rate, it would take a full-time Walmart employee working 12 hours a day more than a million years to earn the equivalent of [Christy] Walton's net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.”

So try and wrap your head around the two statistics cited above: 1) Six people (Walmart heirs) have passive net worth - the money is inherited through stock; they don't need to do anything to earn it - equal to more than the bottom 40% of the people in the US; and 2) It would take a Walmart employee working a 12-hour day a million years to earn just one Walmart heir's financial assets.

Think of these two figures as the 2016 political campaign unfolds and you hear many politicians call for an increase in "economic opportunity." It is a disingenuous term because it implies that the problem with the economy is not that money has been massively redistributed upward in the last few decades, but rather that we need a more "pro-business" environment. This is a canard, because loosening regulations and lowering taxes on the wealthy over many years has led to a giant economic chasm between the haves and have-nots, not narrowed it.

Income inequality is going to be talked about a lot less, by Republicans and most Democrats. Income inequality, when fully exposed, explodes the myth of trickle down economics in which wealth, in reality, is redistributed to the rich from the pockets of the working class and poor. The Republicans - and most Democrats - who excoriate those who bring up income inequality and scoff that it evokes class warfare have no objection to reallocating money from the vast majority in the US to the wealthy. They object to an income distribution shift only when it is brought up on behalf of returning that appropriated money to those who actually earned it.

There are much larger issues of financially restructuring the US economic system to be debated than just returning to the status quo before the great income shift facilitated by neoliberal economics. However, as a practical reality, for the 2016 election, the discussion is going to be limited to those who claim that they are advocating increased "economic opportunity" and a much smaller group of politicians who call for an economic redistribution of wealth back to the workers and poor of the United States.

Listen closely, because that distinction is a vital one to the majority of people in the nation.

Expanded "economic opportunity" is a misleading siren song, because if the idea had any merit, we would have seen a vast expansion of "economic opportunity" in the last 35 years. Instead, we have seen a growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few - and stagnant and decreased wages for the vast majority of the rest of the nation.

Don't be fooled by Walmart's announcement that it is raising its lowest wage to $10 per hour for full-time workers by 2016. As Frank Clemente of Americans for Tax Fairness recently wrote on the Huffington Post:

You don't need a Walmart front-door greeter to find the flaw in the company's recently announced boost in worker wages: It's not enough. Not enough to pull its lowest-paid workers out of poverty, and therefore not enough to get American taxpayers off the hook for subsidizing the giant retailer's low-wage payroll.

That's right: Walmart, the world's biggest company, with billions of dollars in profits, relies on you and me to make up the difference between what it pays a large portion of its workforce and what those employees actually need to survive.

The wage increase is just pocket change to the Walmart heirs.

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