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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsKrugman: The Myth of the Deserving Rich
Many influential people have a hard time thinking straight about inequality. Partly, of course, this is because of Upton Sinclairs dictum: its hard for a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. Part of it is because even acknowledging that inequality is a real problem implicitly opens the door to taking progressive policies seriously...theres also a factor that, while not entirely independent of the other two, is somewhat distinct; I think of it as the urge to sociologize....in the context of poverty: many pundits and politicians clearly want to believe that poverty is all about dysfunctional families and all that, a view thats at least 30 years out of date, overtaken by the raw fact of stagnant or declining wages for the bottom third of workers.
There is also a counterpart on the upside of the income distribution: an obvious desire to believe that rising incomes at the top are kind of the obverse of the alleged social problems at the bottom. According to this view, the affluent are affluent because they have done the right things: theyve gotten college educations, theyve gotten and stayed married, avoiding illegitimate births, they have a good work ethic, etc.. And implied in all this is that wealth is the reward for virtue, which makes it hard to argue for redistribution.
The trouble with this picture is that it might work for people with incomes of $200,000 or $300,000 a year; it doesnt work for the one percent, or the 0.1 percent. Yet the bulk of the rise in top income shares is in fact at the very top. Heres the CBO:
Whats a sociologizer to do? Well, what you see, over and over, is that they find ways to avoid talking about the one percent. They talk about the top quintile, or at most the top 5 percent; this lets them discuss rising incomes at the top as if we were talking about two married lawyers or doctors, not the CEOs and private equity managers who are actually driving the numbers. And this in turn lets them keep the focus on comfortable topics like family structure, and away from uncomfortable topics like runaway finance and the corruption of our politics by great wealth.
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http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/the-myth-of-the-deserving-rich
PowerToThePeople
(9,610 posts)CTyankee
(63,912 posts)Oh David, David...ya know ya shudna done it!
theHandpuppet
(19,964 posts)Krugman always is. Thanks for posting. Have to say, don't miss the comments to the article, either. Well worth the read.
SharonAnn
(13,772 posts)Workers are the "Makers".
Those who live off other people's work are the "Takers:.
tabasco
(22,974 posts)would greatly benefit our society.
csziggy
(34,136 posts)Any estate attorney worth the name can structure things so an estate will have little or no inheritance taxes. Those loopholes need to be closed if you want to cut the holdings of the 1%.
Right now there is no inheritance tax for estates below 5 million dollars - but even at that amount estates of tens of millions pay little estate taxes if the attorneys plan carefully.
oldhippie
(3,249 posts)Nobody here can be against that.
frazzled
(18,402 posts)I haven't seen it, but perhaps Wolf of Wall Street is a more important film than I'm thinking in this regard: it kind of busts the myth of the super rich being "deserving."
hunter
(38,311 posts)They play games with money that do not make this world a better place. They corrupt the political process.
I would have progressive income taxes approaching 100% at some multiple of a minimum income (probably less than 20X), equally progressive inheritance taxes, and a small tax on shares traded within a month of purchase to discourage high frequency trading.
elzenmahn
(904 posts)...he believes, basically, in a 100% wealth tax on all wealth over one billion dollars. Billionaires, in this society, would effectively by illegal under his plan.
Faygo Kid
(21,478 posts)Income inequality is the issue of our time, along with climate change. Many others are worthy of that designation, but those two will destroy us.
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)Uh huh...
Rush and his Dominican Republic / Viagra trip is a fine example.
colsohlibgal
(5,275 posts)I believe in the ability of someone to get well off, just not obscenely so. Right now while most of the US is scuffling, the top 1/10th of 1% are raking it in big time. Robber Baron Nation 2014. We need a modern Teddy Roosevelt trust buster.
Supply Side economics is a scam to further enrich the rich, screw everyone else. My first inkling that Obama was not going to govern like he said was when he brought in his money team - the Rubin in and out of Goldman crowd, rather than the Reich/Krugman Keynesian crowd.
We'll get it right when enough people start to think things through and decide to vote for their own self interest. Too many now buy the Fox lie machine and Rush verbatim and make sure they won't get ahead with their vote.