Time out from the history of the
Church to address a contemporary issue affecting the larger society as we
prepare to choose leadership: I am a historian. My degree is not in Church history, but simply
in history. I studied at a secular university
and while I took courses oriented towards giving me the skills I need for the
history of the Church, there is nothing “Catholic” or “religious” about my
degree. As I often joke, in my time at
the university, I had one Catholic professor for one course and that course was
the History of Islam. All this is said
to make the point that I am not a theologian but a historian and as a historian
I have insights into the field of economics.
I want to make an observation about the state of our economy.
Too much money is concentrated in
the hands of too few people who use it to make more money rather than to feed
it into the consumer economy where it can create employment that will in turn
spread the wealth across a wider and healthier base. This
has not begun under the current administration but is the result of the
economic policies of Presidents Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush, inclusive
of the Democrat Bill Clinton. I am not
commenting on the merits of the various presidents, simply on an economic
policy that was initially termed “trickle down economics” but which has led to
the disproportionate concentration of wealth in the hands of a small percentage
of the general population and which has been disastrous for the Middle
Class. As one of my siblings said to me
several years ago “I have never made so much money and had so little.”
Whatever choices we make in the upcoming
election we need to focus on re-growing the Middle Class if we want a strong
United States and indeed an economically healthy world where harmony among its
peoples is a realistic possibility.
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