Our sinful economy.

On the homepage of whitehouse.gov, there is a headline that reads "Strong Economy" and a blurb that touts the President's "pro-growth strategies." So proud was Bush of his economic policies that he thought they would carry Republicans to victory in November.

He was wrong about the popularity of his policies. And he was wrong about the perceptions Americans have of our economy.

Most Americans can see through the Bush flim-flam.

Even though Bush brags that real wages have gone up by 2.8 percent over the last year, most people's incomes are still not ahead of where they were six years ago.

People know their wallet isn't any fatter, and their bank account's no healthier, and their credit card bills no smaller.

"Revealing the depth and breadth of economic anxieties, 81 percent of the voters told the exit pollsters that they had just enough to get by financially or were falling behind, and 68 percent thought the next generation would have it worse," according to Talking Past Each Other, a new study by the Economic Policy Institute.

A story on the front page of the New York Times business section on November 28 spells out some of the reasons for these anxieties.

Average real incomes fell by 3 percent between 2000 and 2004.

Looked at over the past twenty-five years, things don't get any better. From 1979 to 2004, "the bottom 60 percent of Americans, on average, made less than ninety-five cents in 2004 for each dollar they reported in 1979," the Times reports. For those on the top 95th to top 99th rungs of the income ladder, the past quarter century was splendid: Their income went up 53 percent. And those on the top 0.1 percent rung? Their income went up 348 percent.

That is obscene.

We have a plutocracy in this country, not just of the rich or the very rich but of the unbelievably rich. Those in the 0.1 percent category are the ones who benefit most from the George Bush economy.

As he once put it, "Some people call you the elite. I call you my base."

Meanwhile, in 2004, "the poorest sixty million Americans reported average incomes of less than $7 a day," the Times story said, including the twelve million kids in that bracket.

Seven bucks a day! That barely gets you one meal at McDonald's.

The distribution of wealth in this country is also woefully skewed. In 2004, the top 1 percent of Americans owned 34 percent of the nation's wealth. That's more than the combined wealth of 90 percent of Americans, according to The State of Working America: 2006/2007. Almost half of all American households (46.6 percent) average a net worth of less than $10,000. The net worth of the top 1 percent of households averages $14.8 million.

In terms of race, the wealth disparity is also glaring. "In 2004, the median black household had a net worth of $11,800, or just 10 percent of the corresponding figure for whites."

Our economy is a sin.

We cannot call ourselves a moral people and let this kind of maldistribution continue, particularly when it brings suffering to tens of millions of people.

According to a 2005 Pew Research Center study cited in Talking Past Each Other, "57 percent of those with less than $20,000 in household income said they had not enough money to afford needed health care at times in the past year," and 43 percent of those under $20,000 said they didn't have enough money for food! A January 2006 Pew poll found that 18 percent of all Americans reported not having enough money to buy food for their families during the previous year.

Along with deprivation has come a "new insecurity" even for those who are getting by, according to Talking Past Each Other. This new insecurity includes worries about "layoffs, off-shoring, stagnant wages, cuts in health coverage, and the decline of guaranteed pension benefits." Chief among these is a concern over health care. "Nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of Americans said they had problems paying their medical bills," and of those, more than 60 percent actually had health insurance, the study notes, relying on a Kaiser Family Foundation report from 2005. "Nearly three in ten (29 percent) adults reported that they or someone in their household skipped medical treatment, cut pills, or did not fill a prescription in the past year because of the cost."

The maldistribution of wealth and income in this country is causing people to go hungry and to get ill.

"Social inequality kills," says the Geocoding Project of the Harvard School of Public Health. "It unduly deprives individuals and communities experiencing social deprivation of their health, increases their burden of disability and disease, and cuts short their lives." Nancy Krieger, an associate professor who heads up the project there, has correlated bad health outcomes to the density of poor people in census tracts. We need to "address social disparities in health in the United States," she and her co-authors write in the American Journal of Public Health. "For virtually all outcomes, risk increased with census-tract poverty."

The maldistribution of income and wealth is antithetical to the basic American notion of fairness and equality of opportunity.

There are things we can do about it.

I believe we should have a much more progressive income tax. The top marginal tax rate in the United States used to be as high as 91 percent under Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was in the 70 percent range from 1965 to 1980. And then Ronald Reagan flattened it to 38.5 percent. Now it is 35 percent.

I believe in preserving, or even increasing, the estate tax. Right now, "less than one-third of I percent of all U.S. estates" are subject to the estate tax, since the first $2 million of one's fortune is exempt, explains the group United for a Fair Economy.

And I do believe in taxing unearned income at higher rates than earned income. Unearned income represents such items as interest, dividends, royalties, and capital gains from the sale of stocks, bonds, or real estate. Today, this kind of income--which rich people earn while they sleep--is taxed at a lower rate than wage income. That hardly seems fair.

But you know what? I'd settle simply for a floor of decency, so that no one has to go hungry or survive on only that one McDonald's meal a day, no one has to go without health care coverage, no one has to cut prescription pills in half to make the medicine stretch, no one has to work fifty or sixty or eighty hours a week just to take care of family, no one has to live with the increasing insecurity of being laid off, and losing heath benefits, and losing pensions.

Some thoughtful people over the years have dreamt about what a more just society would look like. From British socialist R. H. Tawney 100 years ago to Michael Albert of Z Magazine today, they have charted out innovative paths of redistribution, allocation, and ownership. While I admire their work, what concerns me most is not the greed of the top 1 percent but the want of so many millions of Americans.

At this stage, the greater sin is not gluttony. It is poverty. It is hunger. It is economic uncertainty. It is lack of opportunity.

So I don't care that much about there being no ceiling for Paris Hilton. I care more about there being no floor for a majority of Americans.

If push came to shove, I'd let her pass every dime of her unearned income down to whatever offspring she produces so long as no one goes hungry, or lives in poverty, or is uninsured.

What are some planks of this floor of decency?

Here are three of them.

First, every American deserves decent health care. By a two-to-one margin, Americans believe it's the government's responsibility to guarantee health care for all, according to a January 2006 poll by The New York Times and CBS.

Second, we need to guarantee every American the right to a free college education so that the doors of opportunity are truly open, rather than slamming shut, as they are right now.

Third, we need not only to raise the minimum wage. We need to insist that every American receives a guaranteed annual income of, say, about $20,000 or $25,000, indexed to inflation.

This guaranteed annual income, an idea espoused by people stretching from Martin Luther King Jr. to Milton Friedman, would remove the cruel coercion of the marketplace and outlaw the immorality of letting so many millions of people, including children, suffer physically and emotionally.

With their basic needs taken care of, people would have real choices about where they would want to work.

The remuneration for work would change accordingly. Those who sign up to do some of the more onerous jobs, from collecting garbage to working at the Smithfield hog farms, would be able to command a higher pay because there would no longer be a supply of workers compelled to do the work at whatever low price management was offering.

People would have more free time--there's a vanishing resource--to engage their artistic impulses or to exercise or to be with their friends and family.

Even with this floor of decency, our economy would still, in some ways, be grossly unfair, with that top 0.1 percent raking in enormously disproportionate amounts of income and wealth.

But galling as that may be, this maldistribution is not, in itself, nearly as immoral as the suffering that poverty, and lack of health care, and job insecurity impose.

For too long we've let ourselves be hornswoggled by politicians who play the budget blackmail game, who say the country can't afford to give people universal health care, the country can't afford to let all students get a free college education, the country can't afford to eliminate poverty.

George Bush has given us the answer to that one: the Iraq War.

His illegal, reckless venture has cost the country about $350 billion already, and it's costing about $2 billion a week now. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says when all is tallied up, the war will have cost the country about $3 trillion.

We could build the floor of decency for a lot less than that.