February 03, 2014
Yes, not much of a surprise here. (I had to check the date to be sure I wasn’t reading an old column.) Anyhow, let’s start with the punch line:
“Economic inequality is usually a consequence of our problems and not a cause. For starters, the poor are not poor because the rich are rich.
“The two conditions are generally unrelated. Mostly, the rich got rich by running profitable small businesses (car dealerships, builders), creating big enterprises (Google, Microsoft), being at the top of lucrative occupations (bankers, lawyers, doctors, actors, athletes), managing major companies or inheriting fortunes. By contrast, the very poor often face circumstances that make their lives desperate.”
Really? So the fact that doctors and lawyers secure themselves protection from competition and thereby drive up the cost of medical care and other products (yes, we do pay for corporate lawyers in the price of goods and services) doesn’t affect the income of the poor? Not where I learned arithmetic.
How about the fact that the rich use their control over politicians to get them to run high unemployment policies by reducing the deficit and demand in the economy. This costs low and middle income workers both jobs and wages (see Jared Bernstein and my book on the topic.)
Oh yeah, and what about the fact that the Wall Street boys can get themselves too big to fail subsidies from the government ($83 billion a year according to Bloomberg, a bit more than the SNAP budget)? And of course they also get exemptions from the sales taxes that other industries have to pay. Where does this money come from if not the rest of us?
But hey, Robert Samuelson tells us their wealth has nothing to do with other people suffering. Who are you going to listen to, common sense, logic, and arithmetic or Robert Samuelson?
Then we get Samuelson telling us:
“Finally, widening economic inequality is sometimes mistakenly blamed for causing the Great Recession and the weak recovery. The argument, as outlined by two economists at Washington University in St. Louis, goes like this: In the 1980s, income growth for the bottom 95 percent of Americans slowed. People compensated by borrowing more. All the extra debt led to a consumption boom that was unsustainable. The housing bubble and crash followed. Now, weak income growth of the bottom 95 percent ‘helps explain the slow recovery.’
Actually, the logic goes like this, as told by those of us who knew enough about the economy to see this crash coming. The economy suffers from weak demand because of so much money being redistributed upward to rich people who spend a smaller share of their income than middle and low income households. This problem was aggravated enormously by the explosion of the trade deficit that followed the run-up in the dollar due to botched East Asian financial crisis in 1997.
In the presence of weak demand the Fed allows interest rates to fall more than would otherwise be the case. In the absence of investment demand, these low interest rates create an environment that is very conducive to bubbles, hence we got the stock bubble in the 1990s and the housing bubble in the last decade. In the absence of another bubble to boost the economy we are continuing to see slow growth and high unemployment.
That one is probably too simple for Robert Samuelson to understand, but for most other people it provides a pretty direct link between inequality and the economic and social disaster of the Great Recession.
So the story is pretty simple. The system has been rigged to redistribute income upward. The rich have used their control of the political process to ensure that it stays that way and their control of news outlets like the Washington Post to try to distort reality.
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