<strong><em>"Everybody counts or nobody counts."</em></strong>
<strong>-- HARRY BOSCH</strong>

It's perhaps ironic -- to say the least -- that a pretty good motto for life would come from a series of detective novels.

[caption id="attachment_1310" align="alignleft" width="212" caption="Some are more equal ..."]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/animal-farm.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1310" title="animal-farm" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/animal-farm-212x300.jpg" alt="" width="212" height="300" /></a>[/caption]

But Michael Connolly's archetypal character's outlook is one we could use a lot more of these days. We seem to have fallen into a fallacy in our thinking that George Orwell described best in his classic "Animal Farm."

<em>"All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others."</em>

Sound familiar? Over the last 30 years or so in this country, we have treated some animals much better than others, and the wealth of our nation has flowed to the top 1 percent as never before in our history.

Whether they really believed it or not, conservative economists told us in 1981 that cutting the tax rates in the top brackets would result in greater economic activity and a larger total amount of tax revenues for the government.

It's debatable whether that really occurred, since all other factors couldn't be held constant, but one thing is definitely true. Cutting tax rates on the wealthiest 1 percent has made the rich even richer. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the top 1 percent had 7.5 percent of national income in 1979. By 2007, that share had increased to 17.1 percent.

The middle 20 percent -- the truest definition of the middle class -- had 16.5 percent of the wealth in 1979 but just 14.1 percent in 2007.

How can we possibly say that everybody counts -- that everybody<em> matters</em> -- when the way wealth is distributed in this country makes us look more and more like a Third World country all the time?

The late George Carlin, who was probably our most biting social critic, said in one of his later tours that the reason we call it the American Dream is that these days, you have to be sleeping to believe in it. There is no question that much of our society, much of what keeps people going, is based more on muyth these days than on reality.

It just isn't that easy these days to find something that needs to be invented. And as for starting your own business, just try to find a way to get financing.

It's sad but true that the American Dream of upward mobility has become more fantasy than reality. It has become easier to move from the middle class to the upper class in many of the so-called social democracies of  Western Europe than it is in this country.

I'm not talking about Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, in this case. I would honestly support anyone who I legitimately believed in a political philosophy that simply said that everyone in this country matters as much as anyone else. I don't want some billionaire hedge-fund director to be treated as if he were any more special than a truck driver or a day laborer by the government.

That doesn't mean I don't believe in progressive taxation. In fact, I believe that the people who have taken the greatest benefit from this country should pay a greater share. And as Warren Buffett put it, there is no legitimate reason he should pay a lower percentage of his income in taxes than his secretary does.

Here's the only question that needs to be answered:

Whose country is it anyway?

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