Krugman starts off his Friday NY Times’ op-ed talking about economic inequality and pointing to the recent IRS announcement that, as of 2012, it’s hit an all-time record in these not-so-United States.
I covered this story in my post on Tuesday, “I.R.S.: U.S. Income Inequality Has Reached Record Level (w/Update).”
Meteor Blades, as usual, did an outstanding job with this brutally important topic in his post here on Wednesday: “Having the top 10% collect 50% of household income is not the natural order. That skew can be fixed.”
What I found most interesting in Krugman’s column today was where he went with his narrative as he closed out his piece, tying it into Bill de Blasio’s win in the New York City Democratic Mayoral Primary, earlier in the week…
Rich Man’s Recovery
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times Op-Ed
September 13, 2013
A few days ago, The Times published a report on a society that is being undermined by extreme inequality. This society claims to reward the best and brightest regardless of family background. In practice, however, the children of the wealthy benefit from opportunities and connections unavailable to children of the middle and working classes. And it was clear from the article that the gap between the society’s meritocratic ideology and its increasingly oligarchic reality is having a deeply demoralizing effect…
…
…Basically, while the great majority of Americans are still living in a depressed economy, the rich have recovered just about all their losses and are powering ahead…
…
…I’d note that a large proportion of those superhigh incomes come from the financial industry, which is, as you may remember, the industry that taxpayers had to bail out after its looming collapse threatened to take down the whole economy…
…
…whatever is causing the growing concentration of income at the top, the effect of that concentration is to undermine all the values that define America. Year by year, we’re diverging from our ideals. Inherited privilege is crowding out equality of opportunity; the power of money is crowding out effective democracy…
As he closes out his column this moring, Krugman endorses a
a proposal by Bill de Blasio (while simultaneously referencing the re-emergence of a new type of liberalism that, frankly, Kossack
Th0rn covered much more comprehensively and eloquently in his Daily Kos post just late last night: “
The New New Left Is Coming”)...
…to provide universal prekindergarten education, paid for with a small tax surcharge on those with incomes over $500,000…surely this is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing: Taxing the ever-richer rich, at least a bit, to expand opportunity for the children of the less fortunate.
Some pundits are already suggesting that Mr. de Blasio’s unexpected rise is the leading edge of a new economic populism that will shake up our whole political system. That seems premature, but I hope they’re right. For extreme inequality is still on the rise — and it’s poisoning our society.
Now
that’s change I really can believe in!
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