There’s a great Associated Press interview with Columbia University economist and Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz running in the MSM over the past few hours. Again, per my post from yesterday, this is all part of the promotional tour for his latest book, “The Price of Inequality.”
Here’s an “excerpt of an excerpt” from the AP interview, via HuffPo, on some of his comments on income inequality and Romney’s “politics of envy”…
Joseph Stiglitz: 'This Deficit Fetishism Is Killing Our Economy'
Associarted Press (via Huffington Post)
08/09/2012 11:45 am Updated: 08/09/2012 3:23 pm
“…it's getting worse. Look at the recent Federal Reserve numbers. Median wealth fell 40 percent from 2007 to 2010, bringing it back to where it was in the early '90s. For two decades, all the increase in the country's wealth, which was enormous, went to the people at the very top.
“It may have been a prosperous two decades. But it wasn't like we all shared in this prosperity.
“The financial crisis really made this easy to understand. Inequality has always been justified on the grounds that those at the top contributed more to the economy — ‘the job creators.’
“Then came 2008 and 2009, and you saw these guys who brought the economy to the brink of ruin walking off with hundreds of millions of dollars. And you couldn't justify that in terms of contribution to society.
“The myth had been sold to people, and all of a sudden it was apparent to everybody that it was a lie.
“Mitt Romney has called concerns about inequality the ‘politics of envy.’ Well, that's wrong. Envy would be saying, ‘He's doing so much better than me. I'm jealous.’ This is: ‘Why is he getting so much money, and he brought us to the brink of ruin?’ And those who worked hard are the ones ruined. It's a question of fairness…”
There’s quite a bit more to this than just the excerpt, above. He nails Goldman a couple of times, mentioning how they warn everyone about increasing government debt, yet the subsequent austerity that is being supported via that failed argument results in “a wider income gap [that] leads to a weaker economy.”
And, he discusses the basic “unfairness” and predatory nature of the markets, again citing Goldman, whom he says creates securities that are “designed to fail. That's just taking money from some fool who trusted them. Our society functions well when people trust each other. It's particularly important for people to trust their banks. Goldman basically said, ‘You can't trust us.’”
He covers quite a bit of additional ground, with some pretty intense commentary about the current student loan debacle that’s playing out before us. But, if I kept going here, you’d have no reason to click on the link, up above. So…go for it!