How Much Is Enough? Michael Moore, Warren Buffett, And Class War

Jake Gittes: How much are you worth? Noah Cross: I have no idea. How much do you want? Jake Gittes: I just wanna know what you're worth. More than 10 million? Noah Cross: Oh my, yes! Jake Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can't already afford? -- Chinatown , Robert Towne As the 237 millionaires in the United States Congress argue about the nation's economic, political, and moral priorities (see last week's "What Would Jesus Cut?"), one over-arching truth sits largely unexamined, unmentioned except for firebrands like Michael Moore. Michael Moore said in Wisconsin that in the midst of this round of budget cuts, for some reason we are pretending that the money of the wealthy and super-rich, whose wealth has grown out of all proportion to the realities faced by every other American, doesn't count. The spokesperson aside, there's tremendous truth here: as Forbes told us last fall in their splashy annual feature on the 400 wealthiest Americans, this lucky handful saw their combined wealth grow to $1.37 trillion dollars, more than the holdings of the bottom 50 percent of Americans. The richest 400 of us now control more wealth than 150,000,000 of us. These 400 Americans have their defenders. At The Hill , Armstrong Williams explains that there's neither surprise nor shame here: "It's not a surprise that the top 400 wealthiest Americans own more than the bottom 50 percent combined. These individuals continue to exemplify superior financial stewardship, which embodies the wise use of the resources they continue to multiply." Cool. I guess. I embody superior financial stewardship by managing to pay my bills each month, but wisely (and hard) as I work, I don't note any multiplying resources. In the secular language of freedom we explored for the past five weeks, these Americans have plenty of defenders even among those 150,000,000 less fortunate (and actually there are 300,000,000 less fortunate if we're being literal). It's their money, however they got it. They can do whatever they want with it. In fact, over 70 percent of those Americans who responded to the Pew Economic Equity poll —including those making less than $20,000 a year—seem to have bought into this secular freedom idea, at least when the question is asked in one way. They replied that it is less important to reduce inequality than it is to ensure everyone has a fair chance to improve their economic status. This is American dogma: everyone has the right to get rich. But Michael Moore thinks this gross financial imbalance represents a problem. Is there any possibility that he's right? Well, a couple of months back The Economist put together a special section on rising economic inequity, noting that among other problems it can lead to economic unrest (populist Arab uprisings, anyone?), and last year the magazine ran a feature describing how many Americans have lost hope that their children will do even as well as they did, one of the traditional measurements of the secular American dream. That would, honestly, be tragic, because in real terms most of us aren't doing all that well. As The Economist went on to report, without the financial gains that came when middle-class families became two-income families, many American households would be under water: Between 1947 and 1973, the typical American family's income roughly doubled in real terms. Between 1973 and 2007, however, it grew by only 22% and this thanks to the rise of two-worker households. In 2004 men in their 30s earned 12% less in real terms than their fathers did at a similar age. In the Pew study on economic inequality, Americans changed their response on economic fairness when the question was asked differently. When presented with the fact that "Half of Americans who are at the bottom of the income ladder remain there 10 years later," 60 percent of respondents actually did call this a major problem. Despite forty years of evangelizing for trickle-down economics, despite a decade of big tax cuts for the rich and wrangling over estate taxes, despite bailouts of financial institutions that seem to exist largely to make the rich richer, the problems persist and worsen: unemployment has only just gone under 9 percent, job creation still lags, and every indication is that, as The Economist says, "Rates of social mobility are unlikely to grow. Inequality, however, may widen even further." Does everyone get richer when rich people get richer? No. Rich people get richer. And professional economists recognize the problem of inequity without having to call it class warfare. Some of the rich people also see the problems with too much wealth centered in too few hands; in fact, the two wealthiest people on the Forbes list, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, have pledged to give away most of their wealth. Buffett, who says he will give away 99 percent of his wealth during his lifetime or at his death, joined Gates in calling on the wealthy to pledge at least half of their wealth in charitable giving. Thankfully, there's a rich history of charitable giving from the rich. We owe our National Parks system in its present form to the wealth of the Rockefellers. Andrew Carnegie, although he loved capitalism and competition, said that radical philanthropy was necessary to forge brotherhood between the richest and poorest in society, and he gave away many of his millions to build libraries and help colleges and universities. His essay, "The Gospel of Wealth," published in 1889 concluded with the thought that someday the man who dies leaving behind him millions of available wealth, which was free to him to administer during life, will pass away "unwept, unhonored, and unsung," no matter to what uses he leaves the dross which he cannot take with him. Of such as these the public verdict will then be: "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced." The New York Times reported at his death that Carnegie's estate amounted to $23 million dollars. But in his last eighteen years of life, Carnegie gave away $350 million. In the large Episcopal parish where I serve, there is at least one wealthy individual who follows in these footsteps. I have heard that this person gives a substantial amount of money to the church, and believe this parishioner to be a generous and genuinely good human being, although we are on different sides of a number of divides.But I also have overheard this individual telling priests or preachers that it is wonderful when they choose not to preach about wealth from the pulpit. "I am sick and tired," I heard this person saying on one such occasion, "of being told that God doesn't love me." It is not my place to correct my friend; God, of course, loves this person, love beyond reckoning, whatever the priests or I might preach that the tradition tells us about wealth. But, if the Bible and the gospels are any indication, God loves the poor at least as much (in some theological traditions, God is said to prefer the poor, in fact), and God knows that sometimes all they have in their corner is divine grace... and, perhaps, the commandments from the tradition that those who are blessed by God with resources share those resources with those who need them most. Whatever we have is a blessing. But it is a blessing that comes with the responsibilities we have been discussing in recent weeks. Now I am not so prejudiced to say that Bono and other wealthy Christians can't actually be Christians. While the Bible contains a number of similar messages, I am not one of those who reads the words of Jesus to the rich young ruler (Mt. 19; Mk. 10; Lk. 18) as proscriptive of damnation for the rich: Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, "You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions (Mk. 10:21-22, NRSV). I think this was a particular spiritual prescription: one cannot serve God and Mammon, after all, and the young man is deeply grieved by the loss Jesus requests: his money, status, power—all the things, in fact, that our society tells us are important. Jesus sees that he can't get on board with the kingdom of heaven without lightening his load, so to speak. But I also think that Warren Buffet had the right idea. He said that he could give away 99 percent of his massive fortune and not see any difference in his standard of living. If one foregoes a couple of luxury cars—or maybe a house or two—would that really change a person's life for the worse? The richest Americans, according to Fortune , give away something like 11 percent of their income each year, a little more than tithing one-tenth of their incomes. Of the 38,000 families filing estate taxes in 2008, roughly four-fifths of them left no charitable bequest at their deaths. So there is plenty of room for those who don't need all their money to give to those who suffer, those who struggle, those who starve... particularly as the millionaires in Congress try to cut social aid programs and sustain tax cuts that might fund those programs. Now, as Fortune notes of the Gates/Buffett philanthropy crusade, "The question is how many people of wealth will buy their argument." Yes. But our two richest Americans want to encourage their brothers and sisters lauded for their wealth in Forbes that $600 billion dollars worth of radical philanthropy—what Glenn Beck and others could only see as a mammoth redistribution of wealth—is the just thing to do. And the Christian tradition convinces me that they are right.

How Much Is Enough? Michael Moore, Warren Buffett, and "Class War"