Global Elites Getting Nervous About Skyrocketing Inequality (But Won't Spare a Nickel to Fix It)

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/global-elites-getting-nervous-about-skyrocketing-inequality-wont-spare-nickel-fix-it



***SNIP

Case in point: Just after Thanksgiving, New York Times readers found a moving article in the business section detailing the plight of unfortunate retail workers who don’t get paid enough to make ends meet. The author noted the hardship of food stamp cuts and described a situation so bad that companies had set up food drives for low-wage workers and dispensed tips on how to apply for public assistance (independent websites like AlterNet had been all over this story for weeks).

For a human touch, the NYT author quoted a depressed mom who works at Sears selling toys that she could never afford to buy for her own children. The author duly noted that Americans support raising the minimum wage by an overwhelming majority, but in typical mainstream media fashion, took a stance of faux neutrality and provided the opinions of two mainstream economists who disagreed on whether raising minimum wage was a good idea or not. Overall, the article seemed cautiously in favor of something that American voters overwhelmingly say they want.

Conclusion: Some elites might be willing to raise the minimum wage just a bit.

But a couple of weeks earlier, the Washington Post ran a widely reviled editorial on Social Security that showed the limits of elite concern. The vast majority of Americans, aware of an oncoming train wreck of a retirement crisis, are against cuts to Social Security, but the editorial board at the Post made it clear that elites are not on their side and laid out various specious arguments, including an irrational appeal to deficit hysteria (the deficit is actually decreasing), to bolster its antisocial perspective. Elizabeth Warren, increasingly a thorn in the side of greedy elites, blasted the Post.

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1. "When it comes to economic issues, elites and ordinary folks are often at odds ...

When it comes to economic issues, elites and ordinary folks are often at odds, but according to a recent Pew survey, they converge on identifying the gap between rich and poor as a major flaw in the system.

So there you have it. Global elites know that they have a vital interest in solving the problem of inequality, but few are willing to pay a dime or accept substantive changes to our economic system in order to solve it.

This is a chart from the Pew poll cited in the article. Interesting that Europeans (and practically every other part of the world) are more concerned about income inequality than Americans are, though inequality is worse here.



http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/11/15/the-global-consensus-inequality-is-a-major-problem/

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2. +1