Sep 22, 2013 5 min read

I wish I had some good news for your Sunday morning. Unfortunately, I don’t.

According to Census Bureau figures, even though our economy is improving, even booming at the stock-market level, the number of impoverished Americans has increased. In 2011, there were 46.2 million Americans with an income below the federal poverty level. Today, there are 46.5 million.

Poverty-level income is considered $23,550 for a family of three, and $11,490 for a person living alone (that figure will be important later in this column).

These figures highlight a lot of things and can be manipulated to support many arguments. “It’s Obama’s fault!” conservatives could yell. They could also yell, “This proves the laziness of our populace. They look for any excuse not to work!”

As for me, I’m going to use this set of data to show that the “trickle-down” economy the one percent wants us to buy into is an elaborate fairy tale. I truly hope people see this now. Like the drying Colorado River, a glorious rush of wealth is hoarded away by the greedy, slows to a pitiful drip, and then disappears before it reaches an entire ocean of people who need it.

And yet, the one percent will continue to tell the 99 percent that we are a bunch of bottom-feeding whiners who don’t appreciate the gifts they give us. People like Harry Binswanger will argue, as he did for Forbes Magazine, that, in fact, it’s the 99 percent who owe the one percent — for the iPhone and the assembly line; for the inventions that improved our lives (never mind that the men behind the two inventions he highlighted are dead now).

He goes on to argue, absurdly, that anyone making over $1 million a year should not have to pay taxes, because they’ve already paid their debt to society by sharing their intellect and creating jobs.

He blathers, “An end must be put to the primordial notion that one’s life belongs to the tribe, to ‘the community’ and that the superlative wealth-creators must do penance for the sin of creating value.”

Can you imagine what the world would be like if populated entirely by people like this? People who put “community” in scare quotes as if it is not a real thing, or even worse, is something to be mocked.

Really, we just want the wealthy to pay their share back to the society that strung the electric lines to power their factories, worked long hours to make their abstract ideas a concrete reality and paved the roads that take them home. Why is it so hard for Binswanger to see we’re all in this together — that those who rise above the fold do so thanks to a combination of talent, luck, privilege and other people?

It sure would have been an amazing sight if millions of iPhones had sprung from Steve Jobs’ precious imagination and into the world all on their own.

Sure, Jobs and Henry Ford put people to work. Jobs put to work a smattering of highly intelligent American developers and engineers, and then put thousands of Chinese laborers into 16-hour-a-day jobs for basically nothing. And Henry Ford, and the heyday of the human-powered assembly line, died a long time ago.

And now for a heartbreaking story of a human life that shows the capitalist, big-dog/little-dog model at work.

One day after Binswanger opined about the poor owing the rich, United Steelworkers Union general counsel Dan Kovalik wrote, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, about a woman named Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct instructor who taught French at Duquesne University for 25 years.

Vojtko’s students gave her “glowing reviews.” She never missed a day of work. And this year, Duquesne decided not to renew her contract, which, the year before had paid her a measly $10,000 without benefits. That’s an income $1,000 under the poverty level, paid to a college-level instructor.

Vojtko could not afford to heat her home last winter, so she worked nights at Eat-n-Park and slept in her office at Duquesne. Now she had no job at all and no office. Adult Protective Services were trying to take her in for not being able to care for herself, and as a professional, intelligent woman, she was humiliated.

Last week, she died of a heart attack in her front yard. She was 82.

As I’ve said before, 70 percent of university faculty is made up of contingent adjuncts like Vojtko. And the president of Duquesne? He made $700,000 last year.

And so we have two, dual rallying cries: one from a tone-deaf capitalist who thinks the super-wealthy deserve more than what they already have because of their superior intellect, and one from a woman of superior intellect who died, alone and penniless, outside of her crumbling house.

I think it’s time for everyone to choose a side.

Jessica Vozel is a resident of Perryopolis.