Who's to blame when nothing trickles down?

From Sunday's Virginian-Pilot. This started out referencing Hank Williams' "My Bucket's Got a Hole In It." No matter how you slice it, someone isn't getting his fair share, whether it be beer or wages.

Capitalism under President Obama has fared better than ever before.

Corporate America is sitting on between three and five trillion dollars of cash reserves stashed in American banks and overseas accounts.

The top 1% of the top 1%—that’s .01% have done even better in the last thirty years. This group of the top 400 billionaires, plus those billionaires left over who couldn’t quite break into the top 400, what I like to refer to as the poorer billionaires, sit at the head of America’s corporate boards. In 1979, there were about three billionaires.

At first glance, the country seems to be doing pretty well under its first Socialist president. Certainly better than anyone would have guessed. Corporate taxes are lower than ever, corporate incentives—they don’t like the term loop holes—are higher than ever at $92 billion, and corporate profits are going through the roof.

The only aspect of Capitalism that isn’t working, as luck would have it, is that aspect that actually affects the workers—the trickle-down.

Apparently—and you would have to ask the CEOs why this is—but apparently nothing is trickling down. It appears as if everything is being sucked up. In 2013, the average CEO salary was $13.9 million, a 9% increase over 2012 while the average minimum wage worker took home about $15,000, the same as he did in 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009.

Half of the workers earning that minimum wage were over the age of 25. They weren’t teenagers earning movie money.

Investors have done as well as CEOs. Apparently, raising their tax rates a few points hasn’t discouraged them to the point where they don’t even want to get out of bed in the morning. That’s a good thing because America does need investors. These so called job creators do have a role to play in the free market.

Job creators are important. But job creators are not more important than the people doing the jobs.

While the right wing attacks Socialist America and the left wing attacks Capitalist America, maybe common sense America should be leading the charge against the real culprits—greedy America.

Everyone from Reagan to Roosevelt, Carry Nation to Tea Party Nation, Rand Paul to Paul Ryan to Paul Bunyan should know what greed is. Greed is what’s doing the country in. No defender of Capitalism should be a defender of greed.