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Eat the Poor!
Mar. 6th, 2006 08:23 am♠
Mr. Bush once joked that his base consisted of the "haves and the have-mores." But it wasn't much of a joke.
-- Paul Krugman for The NY Times
Mr. Krugman throws out some more red meat to to liberals and egalitarians:
The fact is that we're living in a time when most Americans are seeing little if any benefit from overall income growth, because their share of the economic pie is falling. Between 1979 and 2003, according to a recent research paper published by the I.R.S., the share of overall income received by the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers fell from 50 percent to barely over 40 percent. The main winners from this upward redistribution of income were a tiny, wealthy elite: more than half the income share lost by the bottom 80 percent was gained by just one-fourth of 1 percent of the population, people with incomes of at least $750,000 in 2003.
As a wide-eyed undergraduate, young Monk was given to fixating on such indications of plutocratic conspiracy of evil capitalists feeding off the blood of the good common people. As with so much, the story just got old - how long can one remain the shocked virgin? Moreover, Monk came to understand that the good common people are not essentially different from the evil capitalists, just poorer. But I still follow it a little and like to keep some track.
xXx
Mr. Bush once joked that his base consisted of the "haves and the have-mores." But it wasn't much of a joke.
-- Paul Krugman for The NY Times
Mr. Krugman throws out some more red meat to to liberals and egalitarians:
The fact is that we're living in a time when most Americans are seeing little if any benefit from overall income growth, because their share of the economic pie is falling. Between 1979 and 2003, according to a recent research paper published by the I.R.S., the share of overall income received by the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers fell from 50 percent to barely over 40 percent. The main winners from this upward redistribution of income were a tiny, wealthy elite: more than half the income share lost by the bottom 80 percent was gained by just one-fourth of 1 percent of the population, people with incomes of at least $750,000 in 2003.
As a wide-eyed undergraduate, young Monk was given to fixating on such indications of plutocratic conspiracy of evil capitalists feeding off the blood of the good common people. As with so much, the story just got old - how long can one remain the shocked virgin? Moreover, Monk came to understand that the good common people are not essentially different from the evil capitalists, just poorer. But I still follow it a little and like to keep some track.
