A day or two ago I penned a short post about a study that showed that inequality in the United States was a result of deliberate governmental policy. The point I tried to make, in a more or less humous vein, is that it doesn’t take a study to make that finding; the facts are staring us right in the face.
To my shock and surprise the post post garnered a comment from the study’s author, David Cay Johnston, which I reproduce here:
JCW, the cynical commentary you offer is not useful.
But for a lot of hard work by a relative handful of people digging through and analyzing the official data you would not be so well informed.
This study is not redundant, it is groundbreaking because it establishes facts that show the prevailing argument about what drives inequality is wrong.
After many years of digging out facts that were not known and getting them into the public record I am happy that you grasp the issues so well.
But a very large number of our fellow Americans, including many of the most politically and economically powerful citizens.
Also see my new piece on these issues, which just went up at National Memo and my earlier column for Tax Analysts on relative income growth of the vast majority and the oligarchs – an inch to 5 miles.
He’s mostly right, of course. (Looks like he forgot to finish the fourth sentence, but it’s easy to see where he was going). We do need these things rigourously proven, though sometimes you have to wonder if that does any good, since the ruling elites and media movers and shakers have an amazing facility for ignoring the facts. Still, I stand by the gist of my observation. It was pretty easy to see, for anyone who understood math, that each and every Republican tax cut was a transparent attempt to shift money from the masses to the elite. That was a matter of simple arithmetic. That left two possibilities. First, that the shift was the whole point. Second, that the politicians involved had no idea what they were doing. The latter seems unlikely to the nth degree, so that leaves us with the former. The same pattern repeats itself over and over, including many bills passed with substantial Democratic support. Repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act is a case in point, though the motivations there could be more successfully obscured than in the “tax cut” bills.
In any event, I want to apologize for seeming to dismiss the hard work that went into the study. Sometimes it is necessary to prove the obvious.
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