The Ghost of Christmas Past took them back to 1973, when the poverty rate was the lowest on record. The Ghost showed them a middle-class family living the American Dream — with decent wages and health care, a comfortable home, money to send the kids to college, and a pension to supplement Social Security.

“Bah!” said the Scrooges of Wall Street. “Humbug!”

The Ghost showed them an affluent family, with expensive finery, fancy cars, a vacation home and millions of dollars in wealth. The Scrooges were not impressed. They made millions of dollars a year.

“What share of national income goes to the richest 1 percent?” the Scrooges asked. The Ghost told them 9 percent.

The Scrooges of Wall Street said, “Bah Humbug!” and were happy it wasn’t 1973.

The Ghost took them to Wall Street on Oct. 9, 2007, when the Dow Jones reached an all-time high, closing at 14,164. The Scrooges were thrilled to be back in that bubble.

The Ghost reminded them that the Dow was way up, but workers’ wages were way down compared to 1973, adjusted for inflation — and poverty was rising. The typical middle-class family worked many more hours than their parents did, but went deeply into debt to keep their home and pay for college, and worried they were a medical crisis away from bankruptcy.

“What share of national income goes to the richest 1 percent?” the Scrooges asked on their visit back to 2007. The Ghost said 23.5 percent — nearly tying the record set in 1928, just before the Great Depression.

The Scrooges sank into a deep sleep, awaking in 2008 to see the Ghost of Christmas Present. The Ghost showed them once-thriving neighborhoods in Ohio, California, Michigan and Florida where foreclosed homes were left to decay, eroding the value of nearby homes, leading to more foreclosures and despair.

The Scrooges saw family businesses going back three generations who were suddenly treated like credit risks, and newer small businesses denied loans to buy equipment needed to fill orders. The Ghost said these businesses were laying off people they would have kept and not hiring people they would have hired, if only the big banks put more money into real business investment instead of usury and speculation.

The Scrooges said, “Bah Humbug!” and rejoiced in their bailouts and bonuses.

Then the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come previewed 2009, showing the Scrooges boarded up homes and businesses across America. The Ghost said one in seven mortgages was in default. The official unemployment rate topped 10 percent. Millions of Americans needing full-time jobs had part-time and temp jobs with inadequate pay and no benefits. Want was keenly felt.

“Are there no food banks and homeless shelters?” asked the Scrooges. “Are there no prisons?”

The Ghost of Christmas Future took them to Washington. The Scrooges of Wall Street rejoiced to see their friends at the White House, Treasury and Federal Reserve insuring their toxic assets, subsidizing their new speculation, and combining occasional tough talk on financial reform with consistently soft action.

The Scrooges heard Sen. Dick Durbin say, “The banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”

The Scrooges saw that their banks and investment firms would be even bigger than before. And they did not change.

The bailout-fattened Scrooges of Wall Street rejoiced in their Abundance of cashboxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds and derivatives. They said, “Bah Humbug!” to Main Street and used taxpayer money for record profits and bonuses and refinancing their global casino.

So now, the Ghost of President Roosevelt has come to inspire us to learn from history. Demand the kind of strong action that reversed Scroogism before — the kind advocated by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute’s New Deal 2.0 project, the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign, and Americans for Financial Reform.

As Roosevelt’s spirit tells us, “If the courses be departed from, the ends will change.”

Taxpayer bailouts saved Wall Street from choking on its own greed. Now, as the Wall Street Journal reports, “Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year — a record high.”

$140 billion is more than the combined budgets of the U.S. Departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Typical workers, meanwhile, make less today adjusting for inflation than they did in the 1970s. Wall Street rewarded CEOs who cut employee wages and benefits and offshored manufacturing, services, and research and development; feasted on Bush’s tax cuts; turned mortgages into loan sharking; and vacuumed up home equity, college funds, retirement funds and other private and public investments into their rigged casino.

Goldman Sachs, for example, “peddled billions of dollars in shaky securities tied to subprime mortgages on unsuspecting pension funds, insurance companies and other investors when it concluded that the housing bubble would burst,” McClatchy reports in a new investigative series.

The Great Depression gave way to the New Deal. The Great Recession has become the Great Ripoff.

The TARP inspector general’s latest report to Congress says, “The firms that were ‘too big to fail’ … are in many cases bigger still, many as a result of Government-supported and -sponsored mergers and acquisitions; the inherently conflicted rating agencies that failed to warn of the risks leading up to the financial crisis are still just as conflicted; and the recent rebound in big bank stock prices risks removing the urgency of dealing with the system’s fundamental problems.”

Enabled by the Bush and Obama administrations, the megabanks are lending less and gambling more — using taxpayer money to pay bonuses, float a new stock market bubble and make even riskier bets.

The U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve have become Wall Street’s ATMs, while unemployment, foreclosures and homelessness rise, states slash public services, and small businesses are starved of credit.

Outside the TARP, trillions of dollars are flowing to the banksters in the form of near-zero interest loans, bond guarantees and extreme leverage for toxic assets. You can follow the money at www.nomiprins.com. Nomi Prins, a former managing director at Goldman Sachs, is author of It Takes a Pillage.

The megabanks are not too big to fail. They’re too big and irresponsible to exist.

Just months after taking office in 1933, President Roosevelt signed into law the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated the commercial banking of savings, checking and loans from investment banks doing underwriting and speculative trading. The former got depositor insurance, not the latter.

Glass-Steagall lasted until Citigroup and other power players killed it in 1999 through the Financial Services Modernization Act, taking us back to the pre-New Deal casino economy on steroids. Now former Citigroup CEO John Reed has joined the growing call to split commercial banking and investment.

In 2000, Congress passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, ignoring the warnings of Commodity Futures Trading Commission head Brooksley Born who said that unregulated trading in derivatives could “threaten our regulated markets or, indeed, our economy.”

By 2002, the four largest bank holding companies — Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup — had 27 percent of FDIC-insured bank assets. Now, reports the Economic Policy Institute, they have nearly half. They overlap with the biggest derivatives dealers — JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup.

The government heavily subsidizes the megabanks, but it’s the small banks that provide higher savings interest, lower fees, lower loan and credit card rates, and do much of the lending to small business, who in turn create most new jobs.

Behind their Main Street rhetoric, Congress and the Obama administration have so far been the change Wall Street can believe in. The administration and Federal Reserve are loaded with revolving door Wall Streeters and their proteges. Campaign donors and lobbyists are working Congress to minimize and distort reform.

Make your voices heard. We need to enact tough regulations and bust the banks who busted our economy — before they do it again.

Grandma could be dead from lack of health insurance before she turns 65 and gets Medicare — 80 percent of first-time grandparents are in their 40s and 50s.

America is the only country that rations the right to health care to those 65 and older.

Lack of health insurance kills 45,000 American adults a year, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health. One out of three Americans under age 65 had no private or public health insurance for some or all of 2007-2008.

You can’t go the emergency room for the screening that will catch cancer or heart disease early, or ongoing treatment to manage chronic kidney disease or asthma. And even emergency care is different for the insured and uninsured. Studies show uninsured car crash victims receive less care in the hospital, for example.

Even with health insurance, many Americans are a medical crisis away from bankruptcy. Research shows 62 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical, a share up 50 percent since 2001. Most of the medically bankrupt had health insurance — the kind insuring profits, not health care.

Health insurance executives don’t worry about going bankrupt from getting sick. Forbes reports that CIGNA’s CEO made $121 million in the last five years and Humana’s CEO made $57 million.

We’re harmed by health industry and political leaders following the Hypocritic Oath: Promise a lot, and deliver as little as possible.

Wendell Potter, CIGNA’s chief of corporate communications until quitting in 2008, testified to Congress, “The status quo for most Americans is that health insurance bureaucrats stand between them and their doctors right now, and maximizing profit is the mandate.” He said, “Every time you hear about the shortcomings of what they call ‘government-run’ health care, remember this: what we have now … and what the insurers are determined to keep in place, is Wall Street-run health care.”

Premiums for employer-sponsored family health insurance jumped 131 percent between 1999 and 2009 — from $5,791 to $13,375 — hurting businesses, employees and families.

Contrary to myth, the United States does not have the world’s best health care. We’re No. 1 in health care spending, but No. 50 in life expectancy, just before Albania, according to the CIA World Factbook. In Japan, people live four years longer than Americans. Canadians live three years longer. Forty-three countries have better infant mortality rates.

One or two health insurance companies dominate most metropolitan areas in the United States.

Health industry lobbyists and campaign contributors have gotten between you and your congressperson so they can keep getting between you and your doctor. There are 3,098 health sector lobbyists swarming Capitol Hill — nearly six for every member of Congress.

As Business Week put it in August, “Health insurers are winning.” They “have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable.”

President Obama should listen to his doctor. Dr. David Scheiner was Obama’s doctor for 22 years in Chicago. On the July 30 anniversary of Medicare, Scheiner said, “I have never encountered an instance where Medicare has prevented proper medical care … Insurance companies frequently interfere and block appropriate care.”

Scheiner belongs to Physicians for a National Health Program, which, like a majority of Americans, favors Medicare for All — 58 percent favored “Having a national health plan in which all Americans would get their insurance through an expanded, universal form of Medicare-for-all” in the July 2009 Kaiser Health Tracking Poll, for example.

Tell President Obama and Congress: Yes we can have Medicare for All. Rep. Anthony Weiner’s amendment would substitute the text of the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act (HR 676), which has 86 co-sponsors, for House legislation HR 3200. Like the even worse Baucus bill in the Senate, HR 3200 would feed for-profit insurers more customers without providing the universal health care Medicare could provide at much lower cost.

It’s time to stop peddling health reform snake oil.

Medicare for All won’t kill Grandma, but it may save her children and grandchildren.

It would take $9.92 today to match the buying power of the minimum wage at its peak in 1968, the year Martin Luther King died fighting for living wages for sanitation workers.

In today’s dollars, the 1968 hourly minimum wage adds up to $20,634 a year working full time. The new federal minimum wage of $7.25 comes to just $15,080. That’s $ 5,554 in lost wages.

“It is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis … getting part-time income,” King told workers in Memphis, Tenn., days before his murder. King said, “We are tired of working our hands off and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate with daily basic necessities of life.”

Imagine what King would say today.

The minimum wage is stuck in the 1950s. With the raise, the minimum wage is higher than 1950′s inflation-adjusted $6.71, but lower than the 1956 minimum wage of $7.93 in today’s dollars.

The long-term fall in worker buying power is one reason we are in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The federal minimum wage was not enacted during good times, but during the extraordinarily hard times of the Great Depression. When the minimum wage became law in 1938, one out of five workers was unemployed and job creation was crucial.

President Franklin Roosevelt called the minimum wage “an essential part of economic recovery.” Roosevelt said, millions of workers “receive pay so low that they have little buying power. Aside from the undoubted fact that they thereby suffer great human hardship, they are unable to buy adequate food and shelter, to maintain health or to buy their share of manufactured goods.”

Roosevelt said, “The increase of national purchasing power [is] an underlying necessity of the day.” And so it is today.

Camille Moran, owner of a Louisiana Christmas tree farm and paralegal service, says, “A minimum wage increase could be the most important factor in powering our economy out of the recession.”

Consumer spending makes up about 70 percent of our economy. The minimum wage sets the wage floor.

We can’t build a strong economy on poverty wages.

A growing share of workers make too little to buy necessities — much less afford a middle-class standard of living.

A growing share of business revenue has gone to executive pay and profits.

In 1968, the richest 1 percent of Americans had 11 percent of national income. By 2006, they had 23 percent — the highest share since 1928, right before the Great Depression.

We can’t build a strong, sustainable economy on a 1950s’ wage floor, 1920s’ income gaps and ballooning Wall Street bailouts.

U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce CEO Margot Dorfman says, “Now, more than ever, it’s imperative employees are paid a fair minimum wage. It is an unsustainable and dangerous downward spiral to push American workers into poverty and expect taxpayers to pick up the bill for the consequences.”

Dorfman is among 1,000 national business leaders and small business owners supporting the minimum wage increase in a statement at www.businessforafairminimumwage.org.

“Anyone who thinks the minimum wage shouldn’t be raised should try living on it,” says Phillip Rubin, CEO of Computer Software for Professionals in Oakland, Calif.

Michael Shuman, public policy director at the fast-growing Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, says, “Raising the minimum wage to $7.25 is an overdue step in providing a decent, fair livelihood to American workers and creating a truly ‘living economy.’”

If the minimum wage had stayed above the nearly $10 value it had in 1968, it would have put upward pressure — rather than downward pressure — on the average worker wage.

The Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign, which I advise, is calling for a minimum wage of $10 in 2010. It’s time to break the cycle of too little, too late raises.

“A fair minimum wage protects the middle class and gives entry level workers some economic breathing room,” says Lew Prince, co-owner of Vintage Vinyl in St. Louis, Mo. “Rebuilding our economy starts with showing hard-working Americans that their work will be rewarded.”

While workers across America were losing jobs, homes and health insurance, Merrill Lynch paid nearly 700 employees more than $1 million each in bonuses last year, amounting to a $3.6 billion bonus bonanza while Merrill lost $27 billion.

Workers have been sacrificing for years. Average worker paychecks are worth less now than in 1973, but CEOs and other rich Americans not only make much more, they pay less in taxes.

Average full-time workers made $41,198 in 1973 and $37,606 in 2008, adjusted for inflation.

CEOs made 45 times as much as workers in 1973 and more than 300 times as much as workers now. The top tax rate was 70% in 1973 and just 35% now; taxpayers pay the top rate on the portion of taxable income that falls within the highest bracket and pay lower rates on income below that. The top rate for capital gains on the sale of stock and other assets was 36.5% in 1973 and 15% now.

Irrational pay and tax cuts have generated a massive redistribution of income and wealth from workers to CEOs, hedge fund managers and others in the richest 1%.

By 2006, the richest 1% had increased their share of the nation’s income to the second-highest level on record. The only year higher was 1928 — on the eve of the Great Depression.

According to the latest IRS data, excluding tax-exempt interest income from state and local government bonds, the richest 400 taxpayers had an average adjusted gross income of $263 million each on their federal income tax returns in 2006 — up from $221 million in 2005 and $67 million in 1992, adjusted for inflation.

Remember, that’s annual income, not accumulated wealth. $263 million comes to more than $5 million a week.

In 2006, the 400 ultrarich were taxed at an average rate of 17% — down from 26% in 1992. The ultrarich get most of their income from capital gains. The capital gains tax was cut from 28% in 1992 to 20% in 1997 and cut again to 15% in 2003.

To make matters worse, the rich cheat more on their taxes. Forbes recently reported on a study using IRS data showing that taxpayers with income between $500,000 and $1 million a year understated their adjusted gross incomes by 21% in 2001, compared to 8% for those earning $50,000 to $100,000, and lower rates for those earning less.

We should raise taxes at the top so the nation’s richest bosses no longer pay lower effective rates than workers and we can start reversing the obscene rise in inequality rather than reinforcing it. President Obama’s plan to cap CEO cash pay at $500,000 for senior executives at companies on the government dole sounds better than it is, affecting few firms and full of loopholes.

At the very least, President Obama should not delay restoring the top tax rate to the 39.6% rate that prevailed in 2000. The Bush tax cuts saved the top 1% nearly half a trillion dollars between 2001 and 2008, reports Citizens for Tax Justice.

The $79.5 billion in tax cuts for the top 1% in 2008 was more than the budgets of the Department of Education and Environmental Protection Agency combined. In 2008, it took an annual income greater than $462,000 just to get into the top 1 percent.

Even better, we should add a top rate of 50% on income above $1 million, as advocated by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings among others.

People for whom $1 million and above is an annual paycheck should pay more so people for whom $1 million is an unattainable lifetime fortune don’t have to.

If we don’t start taxing the wealthy more now, then you can be sure that the mountain of debt created by tax cuts and the bailout will be used to drive “entitlement reform.” Workers’ last forms of security — Social Security and Medicare — will be on the chopping block to pay for the wreck the truly entitled made of our economy.

Until 1968, minimum wage workers took frequent and big enough steps forward to make overall progress. Since 1968, when the minimum wage reached its peak buying power, workers have taken many steps backward for every step forward.

The July 24 minimum wage raise is so little, so late that workers will still make less than they did in 1997, adjusting for the increased cost of living, and way less than in 1968.

The decade between the federal minimum wage increase to $5.15 an hour on Sept. 1, 1997, and the July 24, 2007 increase to $5.85 was the longest period in history without a raise.

Gas prices rose from $1.23 to $2.97 a gallon in the same period. Now it’s over $4.

The new $6.55 minimum wage is lower than the 1997 minimum wage, which is worth $6.88 in 2008 dollars, and way lower than the inflation-adjusted $9.86 minimum wage of 1968. For full-time workers that translates into $20,509 a year at the 1968 rate, compared with just $13,624 at the hourly rate of $6.55.

The minimum wage does not provide a minimally adequate living standard — and it still won’t when the last scheduled raise to $7.25 takes place next July.

Workers are constantly choosing what to go without — “heat or eat,” child care or health care.

Health care aides can’t afford to take sick days. Retail clerks and child care workers depend on food banks. Security guards sleep at homeless shelters.

It wasn’t always this way. Workers used to share in the gains of rising worker productivity.

Between 1947 and 1973, worker productivity rose 104 percent and the minimum wage rose 101 percent, adjusting for inflation. The middle class grew.

Between 1973 and 2007, productivity rose 83 percent and the minimum wage fell 22 percent, adjusting for inflation. Average worker wages fell 10 percent while domestic corporate profits rose 219 percent, and profits in the disproportionately low-wage retail industry jumped 346 percent. More jobs paid poverty wages.

Higher education does not protect you from falling wages. The inflation-adjusted wages of recent college graduates were lower in 2007 than they were in 2001.

There’s been a massive shift of income from the bottom and middle to the top. The richest 1 percent of Americans has increased their share of the nation’s income to a higher level than any year since 1928, the eve of the Great Depression.

Our modern robber baron age features people like Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo. He pocketed $103 million last year as the subprime mortgage ponzi scheme morphed into the worst financial crisis since the Depression.

Minimum wage workers don’t put raises into predatory lending, commodity speculation or offshore tax havens. They recycle their needed raises back into local businesses and the economy through increased spending.

Eight of the “SurePayroll Top Ten States for Small Businesses” in 2008 have had state minimum wages above the federal level. They include Washington, California and Oregon, three of the four states with the highest minimums.

Minimum wage raises are stimulus for an economy tanking from a housing bubble gone bust, sharply higher oil prices, extreme inequality, unsustainable debt, and fraud and speculation crowding out productive investment.

Higher wages benefit business by increasing consumer purchasing power, reducing costly employee turnover, raising productivity, and improving product quality and company reputation. They reinforce long-term success.

Let Justice Roll, a national faith, community, labor and business coalition, which I advise, is calling for a minimum wage of $10 in 2010.

$10 in 2010 will bring the minimum wage closer to the value it had in 1968, a year when the unemployment rate was a low 3.6 percent.

It will bring the minimum wage closer to the “minimum standard of living necessary for health, efficiency and general well-being of workers” promised by the Fair Labor Standards Act establishing the minimum wage 70 years ago.

It will strengthen the foundation under our unsound economy.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune News Service, July 22, 2008

The richest 1 percent of Americans received about $491 billion in tax breaks between 2001 and 2008. That’s nearly the same amount as U.S. debt held by China — $493 billion — in the form of Treasury securities.

Do you want our government to mortgage more of our nation’s future to finance tax breaks for the rich?

Tax cuts have already helped the richest 1 percent — whose annual incomes average about $1.5 million — increase their share of the nation’s income to a higher level than any year since 1928 on the eve of the Great Depression.

Wall Street’s five biggest firms paid “a record $39 billion in bonuses for 2007, a year when three of the companies suffered the worst quarterly losses in their history” and are eliminating thousands of jobs as losses mount from the subprime mortgage market collapse, reports Bloomberg.

The International Monetary Fund says the United States is in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Yet, we are borrowing money with interest to finance tax cuts for Wall Street executives.

For Americans below the top 1 percent, the tax cuts have been a giant swindle. The bottom 99 percent of taxpayers were left with a bill of $3.74 in debt for every $1 in federal tax cuts from 2001 to 2006, reports Citizens for Tax Justice. Only the top 1 percent came out ahead.

Meanwhile, the federal budgets for environmental protection and housing for the elderly have been slashed more than 20 percent since 2001, adjusted for inflation, the Community Development Block Grant budget is down 32 percent, and the lack of health insurance is an epidemic.

Most households aren’t even earning as much as they did in 1999, adjusting for inflation. But the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes doubled their incomes between 2002 and 2005.

According to the latest IRS data, which excludes tax-exempt interest income from state and local government bonds, the richest 400 taxpayers reported an average $214 million each on their federal income tax returns in 2005 — up from $104 million in 2002.

As the Wall Street Journal observed, “It’s also important to remember that these figures don’t represent wealth or even lifetime earnings — merely income for a single year.”

Thanks to tax cuts, it’s now common for the nation’s richest bosses to pay taxes at a lower rate than workers. The 400 richest taxpayers paid only 18 percent of their income in federal individual income taxes in 2005 — down from 30 percent in 1995.

“The drop in effective tax rates for the top 400 filers,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports, “worked out to a tax reduction of $25 million per filer in 2005.” It would take 673 average workers earning $37,149 a year to reach $25 million today.

While tax cuts help the superrich compete over who has the biggest submarine-carrying superyacht, Katrina survivors are being hit with foreclosures, and neglected levees and bridges around the country are a disaster waiting to happen.

Most of the provisions of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of 2010. President Bush wants to make them permanent.

The richest 1 percent of households would receive nearly $1.2 trillion in tax cuts from 2009 through 2018, reports the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

How much is $1.2 trillion? More than all the debt accumulated in the nearly 200 years from George Washington through Ronald Reagan’s first two years in office. That’s before adding interest payments on the borrowed $1.2 trillion.

Tax cuts for the wealthy fuel rising inequality along with rising debt and neglect. Taxpayers with annual incomes above $1 million in fiscal year 2012, for example, would increase their after-tax income by 7.5 percent thanks to an average tax cut of $162,000. The poorest 20 percent of taxpayers would get an average tax cut of $45 — and decaying public services.

Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama promise to end the tax breaks for the wealthy. Republican candidate John McCain wants to extend them. What do you want?

Until 2005, multimillionaires could still make the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans. In 2006, the Forbes 400 went billionaires only.

This year, you’d need a Forbes 482 to fit all the billionaires.

A billion dollars is a lot of dough. Queen Elizabeth II, British monarch for five decades, would have to add $400 million to her $600 million fortune to reach $1 billion. And she’d need another $300 million to reach the Forbes 400 minimum of $1.3 billion. The average Forbes 400 member has $3.8 billion.

When the Forbes 400 began in 1982, it was dominated by oil and manufacturing fortunes. Today, says Forbes, “Wall Street is king.”

Nearly half the 45 new members, says Forbes, “made their fortunes in hedge funds and private equity. Money manager John Paulson joins the list after pocketing more than $1 billion short-selling subprime credit this summer.”

The 25th anniversary of the Forbes 400 isn’t party time for America.

We have a record 482 billionaires — and record foreclosures.

We have a record 482 billionaires — and a record 47 million people without any health insurance.

Since 2000, we have added 184 billionaires — and 5 million more people living below the poverty line.

The official poverty threshold for one person was a ridiculously low $10,294 in 2006. That won’t get you two pounds of caviar ($9,800) and 25 cigars ($730) on the Forbes Cost of Living Extremely Well Index. The $20,614 family-of-four poverty threshold is lower than the cost of three months of home flower arrangements ($24,525).

Wealth is being redistributed from poorer to richer.

Between 1983 and 2004, the average wealth of the top 1 percent of households grew by 78 percent, reports Edward Wolff, professor of economics at New York University. The bottom 40 percent lost 59 percent.

In 2004, one out of six households had zero or negative net worth. Nearly one out of three households had less than $10,000 in net worth, including home equity. That’s before the mortgage crisis hit.

In 1982, when the Forbes 400 had just 13 billionaires, the highest paid CEO made $108 million and the average full-time worker made $34,199, adjusted for inflation in $2006. Last year, the highest paid hedge fund manager hauled in $1.7 billion, the highest paid CEO made $647 million, and the average worker made $34,861, with vanishing health and pension coverage.

The Forbes 400 is even more of a rich men’s club than when it began. The number of women has dropped from 75 in 1982 to 39 today.

The 400 richest Americans have a conservatively estimated $1.54 trillion in combined wealth. That amount is more than 11 percent of our $13.8 trillion Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — the total annual value of goods and services produced by our nation of 303 million people. In 1982, Forbes 400 wealth measured less than 3 percent of U.S. GDP.

And the rich, notes Fortune magazine, “give away a smaller share of their income than the rest of us.”

Thanks to mega-tax cuts, the rich can afford more mega-yachts, accessorized with helicopters and mini-submarines. Meanwhile, the infrastructure of bridges, levees, mass transit, parks and other public assets inherited from earlier generations of taxpayers crumbles from neglect, and the holes in the safety net are growing.

The top 1 percent of households — average income $1.5 million — will save a collective $79.5 billion on their 2008 taxes, reports Citizens for Tax Justice. That’s more than the combined budgets of the Transportation Department, Small Business Administration, Environmental Protection Agency and Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Tax cuts will save the top 1 percent a projected $715 billion between 2001 and 2010. And cost us $715 billion in mounting national debt plus interest.

The children and grandchildren of today’s underpaid workers will pay for the partying of today’s plutocrats and their retinue of lobbyists.

It’s time for Congress to roll back tax cuts for the wealthy and close the loophole letting billionaire hedge fund speculators pay taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries.

Inequality has roared back to 1920s levels. It was bad for our nation then. It’s bad for our nation now.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune News Service

The same year Harry Potter and the $5.15 minimum wage made their debuts, in 1997, Business Week declared CEO pay was “Out of Control.” Since then, CEO pay has gotten more out of control.

Average CEO pay at the top 500 companies jumped 38 percent to $15.2 million in 2006 — the year we broke the record for the longest period ever without a raise in the federal minimum wage.

The July 24 minimum wage increase from $5.15 to $5.85 is so little, so late, that the minimum wage is still worth less than it was back in 1997, when it was $6.67 in today’s dollars.

Minimum wage workers had more buying power when Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton opened his first Walton’s 5 & 10 in 1951.

CEOs make more in 90 minutes than minimum wage workers make in a year.

The two longest periods in history without a minimum wage increase have occurred since 1980. Those long draughts without a raise have left minimum wage workers in the dust.

In 1980, the average CEO at a big corporation made as much as 97 minimum wage workers. In 1997, the average CEO made as much as 728 minimum wage workers.

Last year, CEOs made as much as 1,419 minimum wage workers.

“As the productivity of workers increases, one would expect worker compensation to experience similar gains,” a 2001 U.S. Department of Labor report observed.

Instead, the gains have gone to record-breaking profits, CEOs and other have-mores.

Between 1980 and 2006, worker productivity went up 70 percent, average worker wages went nowhere, the minimum wage fell 32 percent, and domestic corporate profits rose 256 percent, adjusting for inflation.

A red light for minimum wage was a green light for accelerating greed.

Adjusting for inflation, men in their thirties make less today than their fathers’ generation made in the 1970s.

It’s time to stop overpaying CEOs enough to keep their families rich for many generations to come at the expense of workers paid poverty wages today.

Even the state with the highest minimum wage, Washington at $7.93, doesn’t match the buying power of the federal minimum wage at its peak in 1968. Worth $9.56 in today’s dollars, the 1968 minimum wage was more than $2 higher than the scheduled raise in the federal minimum wage to $7.25 on July 24, 2009.

Too bad we can’t use Hermione’s magical Time-Turner to send the minimum wage and CEO pay both back to 1968.

The minimum wage sets the wage floor. If the minimum wage had stayed above $9, Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, our nation’s largest employers, couldn’t routinely pay wages much lower.

Wal-Mart’s wages would be closer to Costco, which pays starting wages over $10 an hour. Costco CEO Jim Sinegal has long asserted, “Paying your employees well is not only the right thing to do, but it makes for good business.”

McDonald’s starting wages would be more like In-N-Out Burger, which has a minimum wage of $9.50 an hour and has long ranked first or tied for first nationwide among fast food chains in overall excellence.

Our nation’s minimum wage would be closer to Harry Potter’s U.K., where the minimum wage already tops $10, child poverty rates have fallen sharply, and the economy is stronger than ours.

Overpaying CEOs and underpaying workers is bad for business. Studies show that showering stock options on chief executives lowers shareholder returns, and increases the likelihood companies will cook their books, default on debt and go bankrupt.

Higher worker wages benefit business by increasing consumer spending, reducing costly employee turnover, raising worker morale and productivity, and improving product quality and company reputation.

In the words of Gary Theilen, owner of Theilen Farm and Cattle in Enid, Okla., “As a small-business owner who has always paid well above the minimum wage, it has been my experience that paying living wages makes good business sense. It is good for business, workers and the community.”

Theilen has joined business owners from across the nation in endorsing higher minimum wage at Business for a Fair Minimum Wage.

Paying workers enough to live on is the minimum employers should do.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune News Service