LENORE SKENAZY American equality? Now that's rich

America is the land of opportunity. Granted. But the opportunity for what?
Well, if you're rich, there's a whole lot of opportunity to stay rich. And if you're poor, you have plenty of opportunity to pass that hard life on to your kids. That's because, among the top 11 developed countries -- France, Germany, Japan, etc. -- America now ranks as the most unequal, in terms of wealth. In jolly old class-stratified England, for example, the top 1 percent of Brits own 18 percent of the wealth. In America that top percent owns a whopping 33 percent.
Even worse than this income disparity is that the American dream is dying: Our country is now second to last (thank goodness for Canada) in terms of its poor people ever escaping from poverty.
Hard to believe? You bet it is. It's hard even to stomach. It goes against everything that brought, among millions of others, my own impoverished grandparents to this golden land. One grandpa a bricklayer, one a candy maker, they lived to see their children and grandchildren prosper.
Is that era dead?
Well it's certainly not doing a tap dance. At a lecture at the New School recently, Godfrey Hodgson, author of "More Equal than Others," pretty much confirmed the worst:
If your parents were uneducated, what are the chances of you ending up a professional? Two percent. So much for mobility.
Wages for the average stiff? From 1981 through 1995, they fell by 5 percent, in real terms. The richest 1 percent of Americans saw their incomes soar by 78 percent.
So much for equality.
Today, even if you are working full time, there's a good chance you are not making enough to finance four years of ever-more-expensive college for your kids. Which means they'll have to take jobs that require only a high school diploma. Those jobs pay pretty poorly, which is bad news not just for your kids but for the country.
"If the jobs for people with a high school education don't pay a decent wage, we won't have prosperity," says Betsy Leondar-Wright, spokeswoman for United for a Fair Economy, an advocacy group.
What happened to all that promise America once was bubbling with?
Blame the government
First of all, she says, government slashed many programs that once helped the lowly get a leg up. For instance, she says, "Subsidies for first-time homeowners were drastically cut."
Then, too, wages are stagnating, thanks to global competition and companies threatening to move overseas.
But most of all, our tax policy -- especially President Bush's -- has heaped such riches upon the wealthy that while that top 1 percent owns 33 percent of all the wealth, the bottom 40 percent owns 0.3 percent. Yes, there is a dot in front of that 3.
So maybe it's time to start demanding a society where more opportunity trickles down and less trickles up. Unless, of course, you want a country where the rich get richer and the poor get children. Who stay poor.
X Lenore Skenazy is a columnist for the New York Daily News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune.