The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
Now that “Parasite” has swept the Oscars, the shocking movie about the class divide between rich and poor in South Korea is sparking conversations about our own gaping income inequality.
But it struck me watching the tale of the working classes leeching for survival from the basements of their lofty hosts that we in Seattle are so far gone you couldn’t even make such a movie here. The underclass in “Parasite” at least had places to live. Whereas we have thousands of people living on cardboard mats, in tents, under bridges or in filth that wouldn’t be presentable at the Academy Awards.
What makes “Parasite” such a powerful story is the tragic way the lower and upper classes mix in the movie. But my thought when the movie ended was: At least they’re still interacting. Here the chasm between the bottom and top feels unbridgeable, so vast it’s hard to imagine a believable tale in which the downtrodden of our city could end up on the same planet of daily life as the 1-percenters.
That’s what the data show, too. Recently, The Washington Post looked at the share of national wealth owned by the different classes, comparing South Korea to America using figures from the World Inequality Database. South Korea is extremely unequal, with its top 1 percent owning 25 percent of that nation’s wealth.
But America is much worse. The top 1 percent own 39 percent of all the wealth. What’s most startling is the bottom 50 percent. It owns negative 0.1 percent of the wealth. That means the poor and working classes in America collectively own nothing, and are even slightly in debt.
The situation in Seattle is even worse than these national numbers suggest, as we now match San Francisco on various rich-sailing-away-from-the-poor indexes.
There are cultural and economic reasons for inequality, and not all of them are bad (Seattle’s “prosperity bomb” economy has spun off jobs and great wealth for many). But retired Seattle economist Dick Conway put out a report this past week that looked at what he says is increasingly a major factor for the widening rich-poor gulf — our tilted local tax system.
“If we want to help people at the bottom of the economic ladder, nothing greater can be done than to reform our tax system,” Conway said.
What’s powerful about his report is that he isn’t advocating for new government programs or subsidies for anyone; he just wants to change who pays. His report advocates scrapping all of our sales, property and business taxes — all would go to zero — and replacing them with a simple, flat 10.4 percent state and local income tax with a $15,000 deduction.
Conway is under no illusion that his idea is politically possible, at least not yet. An economic analyst for Seattle companies and governments for decades, he’s been decrying our state’s regressive economic structure for most of that time. The gulf been rich and poor has only widened.
But at least now they’re making hit movies on the topic.
“Seattle is not dying,” Tim Harris, the founder of the homelessness newspaper Real Change said. “Seattle is splitting.”
That’s it exactly. We’ve fractured into such disparate camps that the one probably couldn’t get close enough to the other to feed on its resources even if it tried — as happens so wrenchingly in “Parasite.”
Our poor here are way under the bridge, or in the Jungle, not the basement.
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