The 34 member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) -including the U.S. – have set as their mission “the increase of general well-being“.

So how is the U.S. doing, compared to other member states? According to a report by the Bertelsmann Stiftung, not at all well. The U.S. is at the bottom of the list, in the same company as Greece, Chile, Mexico, and Turkey – as seen in this chart posted by Charles Blow at the New York Times.

Blow levels a fierce and damning indictment:

We are slowly — and painfully — being forced to realize that we are no longer the America of our imaginations.* * *

We have not taken care of the least among us. We have allowed a revolting level of income inequality to develop. We have watched as millions of our fellow countrymen have fallen into poverty. And we have done a poor job of educating our children and now threaten to leave them a country that is a shell of its former self. We should be ashamed.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the very richest of us have been taking more and more while everyone else has had to settle for less and less.

The graph below from Barry Rizholtz The Big Picture showing that household income for all but the very, very richest has barely budged since 1979.

The CBO reports that incomes for “households” in all income groups have risen since 1979 – but that doesn’t mean that people are richer or better off. Much of the increase in “household” incomes is explained by more women entering the work force, forming dual income families.

But the additional household income doesn’t ensure that families are better off financially. Remember back when one income was enough to support a decent life?

Increasing income can disguise increasing poverty if the increase is eaten up by rising costs. For most people, energy and health care costs are growing faster than incomes, leaving less and less money for everything else despite increasing GDP.

And then there’s the fact that real average incomes in the U.S. have stopped growing at all, as seen in this chart posted by Michael Panzner at Financial Armageddon.

With more and more of a stagnant pie going to the top 1%, everyone else has no choice but to get by with less and less.

For the past 30 years or more, America has been obsessed with economic growth above all else. And acquiring wealth is the ultimate sign of virtue, as evidenced in the speech prepared by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor for presentation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, cancelled when the school opened attendance to the first 300 who showed up – and activists from Wall Street movement took up the invitation.

There are politicians and others who want to demonize people that have earned success in certain sectors of our society. They claim that these people have now made enough, and haven’t paid their fair share. But, pitting Americans against one another tends to deflate the aspirational spirit of our people and fade the American dream. I believe that the most successful among us are positioned to use their talents to help grow our economy and give everyone a hand up the ladder and the dignity of a job.

In an op ed at the Washington Times, Cantor reiterates that objecting to income inequality is “class warfare” that gets in the way of growth.

But the politics of division have reared up, fueled by efforts to incite class warfare. * * * Yet last week, the president called for more stimulus spending paid for by higher taxes and more job-killing regulations. The past two years have shown that this is no way to create jobs. In lieu of more wasteful stimulus spending, we should go all-in on ways to invigorate growth.

Economists don’t take trickle-down economics seriously – why do politicians? The consequences have manifested themselves over the last thirty years, for everyone to see. But the idolizing of economic growth enables us to pretend that inequality doesn’t matter.

The idea that exponential growth can continue indefinitely on a finite planet is insane. The consequences of pursuing it – most alarmingly, global warming and attendant climate change – are catastrophic. The social and ecological predicaments we find ourselves in can be addressed only if we let go of the idea of growth and instead embracing degrowth.