This week Alan Greenspan joined the growing chorus of U.S. Economists warning that the greatest problem the country faces is neither the federal deficit, government spending, nor any other pet issue of the right, but rather the stark disparity of wealth emerging as an integral facet of the American Experience as the twenty-first century unfolds.
“I consider income inequality the most dangerous part of what’s going on in the United States,” Greenspan said. “You can see the deteriorating impact of that on our current political system, and you cannot talk about politics without talking about its impact on the economy.”
Unfortunately, Greenspan's suggested
"solution" is as perverse and insulting as you might expect from someone who blithely primed and ran up the most devastating global financial collapse in the eight decades since the Great Depression. His plan to address wealth disparity would be to permit more foreign born workers to immigrate and compete with Americans for jobs (predominantly in the tech sector)--thus driving down wages and fostering a peculiar version of "equality" reminiscient of Orwell's Animal Farm.
“We cannot manage to staff our very complex, highly sophisticated capital structure with what’s coming out of our high schools,” Greenspan said. “If we’re not going to educate our kids, bring in other people who want to become Americans. Let them in here and let them use their skills.”
The "staffing" of our "highly sophisticated capital structure" (as opposed to the employment of ordinary Americans) seems to be a recurring theme as the right struggles to respond to an issue that is plainly threatening to its official organs. This morning's
Wall Street Journal features an editorial by Mortimer Zuckerman again attempting to
frame the issue from the right. Zuckerman acknowledges (as he has to) the grotesque widening of wealth disparity and coyly blames it on the Recession, but concludes that really, too much corporate taxation is the culprit:
[The] reason that the country remains mired in the weakest recovery from a recession since World War II: Government has diminished animal spirits by displaying a hostile attitude toward business.
That attitude is evident in everything from excessive corporate taxes to the incompetence and dishonesty of the ObamaCare rollout. Government is perpetually establishing economic policies and rules that business perceives as overregulation, dampening the willingness to invest...
More deregulation is the key, it seems. And more corporate tax breaks (Are corporations even taxed at all anymore?). Zuckerman regurgitates the right's shallow position that there is really no wealth disparity--only a disparity of
opportunity and raises the eternal claim that zealous regulation has stifled capital investment (and thus kept businesses from hiring). Along with missing the basic point, his assertion simply doesn't
comport with reality.
It's clear that the right has no real rejoinder on this issue and they would prefer that the subject had remained taboo as the unrelenting transfer of wealth in this country continued unabated. Their efforts to substantively address the issue amount to little more than a rehash of tired, old material, and smack of deflection and denial.
Which makes this column in Sunday's New York Times all the more amusing. Authored by Arthur C. Brooks, the President of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, the piece projects a burning concern about the negative psychological effects on the American public caused by merely thinking about wealth disparity. Judge worries that poor Americans will hurt themselves by such "envy," as he terms it, envy that is being "incited" by the surprising new "national fixation" on inequality.
In 2008, Gallup asked a large sample of Americans whether they were “angry that others have more than they deserve.” People who strongly disagreed with that statement — who were not envious, in other words — were almost five times more likely to say they were “very happy” about their lives than people who strongly agreed. Even after I controlled for income, education, age, family status, religion and politics, this pattern persisted.
It’s safe to conclude that a national shift toward envy would be toxic for American culture.
After scolding the "Left" for bringing the problem to everyone's attention ("fomenting bitterness"), Judge then descends into conservative happy-talk mirroring Zuckerman, above, touting what he calls a "'radical opportunity agenda" that will provide a "shared, joyful mission of freedom, opportunity and enterprise." "Regulatory reform." "Education reform." More immigrants for tech jobs. In other words, same shit in a different wrapper.
This is the weak tea the right has settled on as their rebuttal to the issue.
Today, Paul Krugman dissects Judge's "concern" about the psychological aspects of income inequality:
[T]he polling data don’t say anything about envy: when people say that they have lost their belief that hard work will be rewarded, they aren’t saying that they are envious of the rich; they’re saying that they have lost their belief that hard work will be rewarded. To the extent that people have negative feelings about the one percent, the emotion involved isn’t envy — it’s anger, which isn’t at all the same thing. Envy is when you have negative feelings about rich because of what they have; anger is when you have negative feelings about the rich because of what they do.
Krugman sees these right-wing arguments for the desperate flailings that they are:
Suddenly, or so it seems, inequality has surged into public consciousness — and neither the one percent nor its reliable defenders seems to know how to cope.
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