Income Inequality for chumps
by digby
According to this AEI scholar, income inequality has absolutely nothing to do with the wealthy rigging the system to their advantage. It’s pretty much all the fault of immigrants and poor people. In fact, the only role the wealthy play in this apparently, is just being so damned good at what they do — financial services and technology — that their rewards are just naturally hundreds of times more than the average worker. (This is because of globalization. Or something.)
Anyway, if you tax them something really bad will happen which he says is made obvious by the way California and New York have “bumped up against the limits of economic reality.” I would assume that means there’s been a huge exodus of their billionaires — except that hasn’t happened. In fact, the economic reality we are facing in California is the total destruction of the state’s infrastructure and educational systems, which would be helped by having the billionaires pay more but is made impossible by the political constraints created by people who insist on starving the beast. In the end we are going to be a state where doing business is very difficult, but that won’t be because the upper 1% are taxed too much. It will be because the whole place is falling apart like an ancient ruin.
In any case, that’s not really his point. What’s really causing income inequality is all these immigrants who he seems to think are keeping wages low. But it’s not entirely obvious to me how this would affect the huge income disparities between the middle class and the upper 1%. (If you’re a nurse, how does it follow that the low wages of a day laborer are pushing your wages down?) Anyway, it sounds as though he thinks that if we open up all those low wage jobs to real Americans we’ll all be making a lot more money. (I guess he figures that we will be making so much more that we will also be able to pay ten dollars for a tomato, so that’s good.)
The other major problem — the real problem I’d guess — is that in recent years the nuclear family has fallen apart and Wally and Beav are all screwed up on drugs and sex so they don’t know how to hold down a decent job. You see, once we dismantled the American family with all that dysfunctional single motherhood and subsequent crappy parenting, we ruined the workforce.
I’m guessing he believes this would all disappear if we went back to the day when America was truly a great country where everyone lived in lovely little suburbs and was raised in nice two parent families so they learned what it was to work hard. Except, you know, that was something that existed (to the extent it actually did exist) for a couple of decades after World War II.
I’m sure he’s be shocked to learn the truth: this country was actually built by poor, illiterate immigrants, most of whom were separated from their families for long stretches of time — or forever. The extended families that all lived together in cities and on farms were as filled with dysfunction and violence as anything you see today.
The absurd notion that poor people with bad character who are incapable of working hard is as old as the hills. (See: Dickens, Charles) It’s always been a very convenient rationale for the inbred aristocracy to explain why it deserves its ill-gotten gains. And it’s always been bullshit.
We know what’s causing income inequality and it has everything to do with the greed and avarice of the top 1% and nothing to do with the poor dragging down the middle class. But there are always people out there ready to spin that tale and, unfortunately, many people who are willing to believe it. After all, it’s a lot scarier to take on powerful interests than it is to step on poor people. But they’re chumps if they do.
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