Paul Krugman answers this question with devastating detail in his recent, October 20, 2002, essay in the NY Times Sunday Magazine: The End of Middle-Class America.

The few truly rich, the top 1% of the American population, have gotten a lot richer. They have doubled their share of the nation's wealth in just the past 30 years. This 1% now has as much wealth as the bottom 40% of the population.

The median income, the "middle-class" income level at which half the population earns more and half earns less, grew just 10% in the same 30 years. This is a truly stunning annual growth of one half of one percent per year.

Clearly Trickle Down Economics works for the elite 1% of the population, but for the rest of us it is disaster.

A more telling test is this. If Trickle Down Reagan/Bush economics were the elixir it was promised to be, we would expect, after 22 years of practice, our rankings on these key quality of life measures to be the best in the Western world:

• Life expectancy
  
• Infant Mortality through age 5
  
• Functional illiteracy
  
• Deep Poverty - those living on $11/day or less
  
• Public Education

But, of course, they are NOT. When the GOP and their cronies say they are, they are simply telling BIG LIES. As an example, Krugman cites the Business Week issue that listed as a top 25 idea: "the rich get richer, and that's O.K."

In fact they are telling another whopper: the Big Lie that the only meaningful measure of a nation's success is its GDP [Gross Domestic Product per Capita]. GDP is an important metric. It is an indicator of something, perhaps, as Krugman illustrates, the mal-distribution of wealth and benefits.

If we want to understand the truth of how well a society does by its citizens, the quality of their lives, we have to look at a more complex set of metrics, such as: life expectancy, infant mortality before age 5, functional illiteracy, deep poverty, and public education. We could look at unemployment and disease rates as well, just for starters. To paraphrase Bobby Kennedy "GDP measures everything except those things which make life worth living."

It would be very refreshing if our friends in the Democratic Party had an agenda and a platform to achieve the best ratings in all of the important quality of life measures. Clearly Reagan/Bush economics have had more than their fair chance and they have, by all measures of fairness, failed.

In his essay, Krugman goes on to suggest that Gilded Ages and Gilded Plutocrats, not relative middle-class income equality, are the norm in American life. Krugman looked back to the results of the Robber Barons in the 1920s. I suggest he should have looked back a bit further.

I would like to offer a simple question: Why were there no gilded ages in the United States prior to 1886? Hint, I do not think the reason was simply the then current state of the economy. The gap between the wealth of some plantation owners and their workers was already stunning, perhaps a precursor.

The connection the Krugman essay did not make was between corporations that never die and do not vote, yet have the full legal and constitutional rights, and wealth that never dies even when the humans do. This is, as Krugman does point out, the road to a self re-enforcing and self perpetuating feedback system which will create a society based on inherited wealth, not accomplishments and talent: The permanent Gilded Age.

Could it be that gilded ages only emerged in America after the Big Lie told by the Supreme Court reporter in 1886 in his write up of the Santa Clara decision? This former railroad baron claimed the court had decided corporations had all the legal and constitutional rights of human individuals. The Chief Justice sent him a note saying this was not the case. For some reason this lie was not challenged. Perhaps it was such a whopper who could doubt it? Sadly it has become an encrusted carbuncle on our legal system.

If corporations were properly relegated to their true status as non-humans with substantially lesser rights, as was intended by the "Founding Fathers" - at least some of them - I doubt the obscene marriage of corporations and politics could ever take place. Gilded Ages, Gilded Plutocrats and Fascism, I think, are only enabled when corporate interests and political agendas converge, as they so clearly are under the current Bush regime.

I draw your attention to Thom Hartman's book Unequal Protection.

Is this the resurrection of the rule of the plantation owners enriched by cheap labor?

We can now see that the enabling Big Lie in 1886 links forward to the Big Lie of Reagan/Bush Trickle Down Economics that is justified by the Big Lie about GDP.

The GOP is telling us a pack of Big Lies trying to justify their Gilded Age agenda for Gilded Plutocrats.

Just these three examples of a few of the Big Lies told to us by the GOP should make us wonder about other Big Lies they may be telling us. I suspect the GOP mantra of "Deregulation" is another Big Lie. Is the Bush push for war with Iraq another example? Does the Bush position on the environment give us yet another example of the Big Lie? How many Big Lies can you find in the GOP position papers and the White Papers put out by their right wing foundations?

It is past time for a change. It's time to dissolve the corrupting marriage between corporations and politics. It's time to measure the things that make life worth living. It is time to assert the primacy of democracy over plutocracy.

Get out the vote and vote for change. Vote for democracy and quality of life over corporate excesses and gilded plutocrats.