![[Ed says Nay]](http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4958/1794/320/dont_trust.jpg "Ed says Nay")
DallasBlog.com | Trey Garrison:No, the cause of some people being poorer is not that some people are richer. The study Mr Garrison reports on doesn't suggest that. Mr Garrison himself reported what the study does suggest are the causes: unemployment, globalization, the loss of manufacturing jobs and the expansion of low-wage service jobs. Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, has his own explanation: a failing education system leaving more and more Americans in low-paying, dead-end jobs. Mr Garrison doesn't examine these hypotheses, instead inventing a ridiculous straw man cause and asking if people really believe it.
The point of the study is not that there is an income gap (as the blog title implies), but that the gap is widening. Not just in absolute terms (like Mr Garrison's example where everyone's income grows an equal 10%), but in percentage terms as well (where, in fact, really, the incomes of the richest grew 59% versus 19% for the poorest). The end result of this is that a greater and greater percentage of the nation's income is going to the wealthiest.
Mr Garrison implies that those who find this to be a concern are advocating income equality. Again, nowhere in the study is this implied. It's another straw man Mr Garrison invents.
In fact, there are practical reasons to find a widening income gap to be a "bad thing." It is an unstable situation. Stable growth patterns are preferred by those with a desire for long-term prosperity of society. Those growth patterns can contain income gaps forever, but widening income gaps only temporarily. Historically, societies with ever-widening income gaps eventually experience corrections that are often accompanied by rivers of blood. Now, that's a "bad thing." Really.
5 comments:
The blog post I reviewed was by Trey Garrison, not Tom Pauken.
OOps. I was trying to post on the IAF piece and somehow it got to the wrong place.
But, while I'm here...
Are you aware that Lincoln and Cadillac started manufacturing bullet-proof, bomb-proof limousines for sale in the U. S. in 2003. That adds credence to your comment about the French Revolution.
My use of the French Revolution was only to illustrate what happens in societies that let a widening income gap get out of control. The situation in the US is not in danger of that. Americans have a system of government ingeniously designed to prevent such imbalances from developing. And if that doesn't work, we have the French Revolution itself as a sobering object lesson. ;-)
A long thread on this topic has grown over on Dallas Blog. Here are my thoughts on how America has addressed this problem when it came up before in our history:
America experienced a Gilded Age before. Industrial magnates, robber barons, monopolists accumulated an enormous share of America's wealth in the decades before and after 1900. There was a huge income gap.
Society took steps to compress the income gap through trust busting, the progressive income tax, the inheritance tax, and FDR's New Deal. WWII, which brought wage controls, rationing, and a culture that encouraged national service, instilled an ethos that constrained the income gap for 30 years, the post-war decades that saw the biggest boom in the American economy in history, not just at the top, but in the middle class and poor as well. Then, beginning in the '70s and '80s, the decade of greed and the maturing of the Me Generation, the income gap began to widen again and it accelerates to this day. We ignore it at our peril.
If anyone still doesn't believe the income gap is real, it's widening, and it is a threat to our national well being, I recommend reading Paul Krugman's essay For Richer.
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