Why Income Inequality Is America’s Biggest (and Most Difficult) Problem

But, here’s the problem: The same political forces that allowed the 1 percent to take our political system hostage have only worsened in the past decade. As Nick Hanauer notes in a recent Open to Debate formerly known as Intelligence Squared U.S. debate, “At the same time, the percent of labor the percent of GDP devoted to labor has gone from 52 to 42. So that difference is about a trillion dollars annually. So here’s the thing you have to understand. That trillion dollars isn’t profit because it needs to be or should be or has to be. It’s profit because powerful people like me and [Edward Conrad] prefer it to be. That trillion dollars could very easily be spent on wages. Or on discounts for consumers. This isn’t a consequence of some magical law of economics. This is a consequence of differentials in power.”