A Book I Will Read

I’ll be purchasing the book, Winner -Take- All Politics, to read this spring. Here is a bit of a review from The Christian Century.

How the Rich Got Richer
by Anthony B. Robinson | Feb. 24, 2011 | The Christian Century

Since the late 1970s the wealthiest 1 percent of the nation’s population has pocketed more than 35 percent of the real national income growth, which is more than the bottom 90 percent of the population combined. Or looking at it from a different angle, between 1979 and 2006 the bottom 20 percent of the population had real income growth of 0.3 percent and the middle 20 percent had real income growth of 0.7 percent, while the top 1 percent enjoyed real income growth of an astonishing 260 percent.

Members of the middle class have stayed even economically amid the overall growth in the economy, but they’ve done so by working more or borrowing more—and often both. With the Great Recession—induced in large part by the failure to regulate banks and financial institutions, which allowed the wealthiest to become wealthier still—neither working more nor borrowing more remains an option. This decline of a stable and secure middle class, which once carried the freight for civil society, is the real story of the last 30 to 40 years in the U.S.

The decline of the U.S. middle class has a great deal to do with the multiple signs of a culture in disarray, from high divorce rates to rampant addiction, from Americans working so many more hours to the erosion of civic institutions. It has had an impact on the churches too. Churches that play a broad public role have struggled, while those that emphasize a more private salvation and a gospel of prosperity—which fit these times and their growing desperation—have grown.