Is Wealth A Crime? Feel the Bern.

Folks in the bottom 80% just don't try hard enough

When I got into medical school, my grandfather, Julius, told me the story of how when his wife, my grandmother, got colon cancer the surgeon demanded $800 in advance to operate.  Unless my grandfather could come up with the money, there would be no surgery.

"Promise me,"  Julius said, "You will take care of the workers. You will never put money before people."

No one eats cake , unless everyone eats cake

As it turned out, for most of my career, I wound up practicing in upscale Chevy Chase, Maryland where there were precious few who Julius would have considered "workers." And, anyway, there was Medicare by then, so the surgeries got paid.

 Now, I practice among the workers, people who work in factories, or at Walmart, people who work on assembly lines, on roads. Julius would be satisfied with that. 

The people I see in my office now struggle, live paycheck to paycheck and they thank me, which people in Chevy Chase did not often do. They didn't thank me; they paid me, which for the most part, they considered thanks enough.

Grandpa Julius is out there somewhere

For Julius, having much more wealth than what most people had was a crime unto itself.  Once the Revolution hit Russia, public commissars pounded on the doors of the houses of wealthy families  and moved dozen families into a capacious home and the revolutionary official declaimed, "Thirteen families now live where before only one lived!" 

My brother owns three homes now in gated communities and he lives a life of which I doubt grandfather Julius would approve.

"I worked hard for what I've got," my brother would protest.
Which is true. He worked hard at the Ivy League college and the Ivy League medical school his parents were able to afford.

We did not come from money. 

My parents started out in a cold water tenement, and progressed to apartments with hot and cold running water and indoor plumbing and ultimately went to college, got good government jobs and moved into the lower middle class and eventually, through saving and conservative investing, they reached the upper middle class and my father died  in the  lower upper class.

 My father used to look around the sunlit, capacious great room of his last  home in Bethesda and say, "Wow! Who would have ever thought I could live like this?" 

He died in that house, the most tangible symbol of how far he had ascended in life.
He made no apologies for his good fortune, but he never claimed he deserved it because he worked harder. He said a rising tide of American economy had raised his boat along with all the others and he had been lucky enough to get a pretty good boat.

In fact, all the families in the neighborhood where we bought our first home were in the same boat. It was 10 years after the end of World War II and people had saved enough for a down payment and moved into a new development. Most worked as lawyers or administrators in the federal government, although there were a few airline pilots, some businessmen. But everyone was young, had young kids and we lived in remarkable equality--there were only four models of home and none was much different from the others. 

We didn't think about income inequality because we all had about the same. In those days a doctor, a judge lived in the same development along with the rest of us. An undersecretary of some Department, Interior maybe, lived up the street and he got picked up every morning and taken to work in a black limousine.  The guy two doors down, Manuel "Manny" Cohen, was the chairman of the SEC and he got picked up in a government car, too, but it was only a  Ford, so we figured that wasn't as important a job. What did we know? Our next door neighbor, Janet Norwood, was head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and later the Office of Management and Budget , which my father said was an important job.   Big important jobs did not mean you lived in a mansion then. The judge, Harold Green, later decided the case that broke up AT&T and unleashed the world of smart phones.  We all belonged to the same swimming pool, went to public schools and every New Year's Eve, all the parents walked over to someone's house for the party so nobody had to drive.  There were no gates around our community.

Looking around Bethesda, that is no longer true.  I walked used to walk my dog along MacArthur Boulevard in the morning. People from Potomac Maryland took that road into work downtown. One morning I counted forty cars headed into town.  All were either Mercedes or BMW's, apart from the one Rolls Royce and one Bentley.  People in my neighborhood drove Hondas and Toyotas.

I did not envy the BMW guys, because our Toyota was a fine car.  I had enough. Didn't bother me some other people had more. 

Lara didn't care about politics or money

It did bother me, however, when I found myself talking to some BMW/Mercedes guy at some party, to hear him say how he deserved his wealth because he was smarter than the folks who drove Toyotas. He had worked hard. 

What he couldn't see was the advantages he had been given which made his work likely to generate a big income, how he could afford to take chances because if he lost a job, there would always be another job at another law firm or consulting group. It wasn't like his family would be evicted from his Potomac mansion. 

When my wife broke her leg in an auto accident and couldn't go to work and we had to hire a nanny for the kids until she could walk again, we were looking at possibly losing our house, maybe bankruptcy. We had no cushion. Today, according the research by Ky Rysdaal of NPR, 60% of the American workforce says they could not afford an unexpected expense of $1000 and would have nobody to turn to for the cash.

Revolution: a private train in a frozen land

Somewhere along the way, the rich in America have acquired that sense of entitlement we associate with Louis XIV.  They are the people who were born on third base and thought they hit a triple. They have no sympathy and will do nothing to help the 80% left behind. 

Seems to me, the 80% had better start thinking about helping themselves.

There, I am with grandfather Julius, and with Bernie Sanders.