Krugman: Oligarchy, U.S.-Style "Concentration of Wealth Threatens to Make Us Democracy in Name Only"

[Hissyspit]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/opinion/oligarchy-american-style.html

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Oligarchy, American Style

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 3, 2011

Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street, but with an assist from the Congressional Budget Office. And you know what that means: It’s time to roll out the obfuscators!

- snip -

Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

- snip -

The budget office laid out some of that stark reality in a recent report, which documented a sharp decline in the share of total income going to lower- and middle-income Americans. We still like to think of ourselves as a middle-class country. But with the bottom 80 percent of households now receiving less than half of total income, that’s a vision increasingly at odds with reality.

In response, the usual suspects have rolled out some familiar arguments: the data are flawed (they aren’t); the rich are an ever-changing group (not so); and so on. The most popular argument right now seems, however, to be the claim that we may not be a middle-class society, but we’re still an upper-middle-class society, in which a broad class of highly educated workers, who have the skills to compete in the modern world, is doing very well.

It’s a nice story, and a lot less disturbing than the picture of a nation in which a much smaller group of rich people is becoming increasingly dominant. But it’s not true.

MORE

[unkachuck]

1. K&R....n/t

[Electric Monk]

2. &U&G&M&A&N

[sam11111]

3. data u need

(graph is from Wikipedia, on page linked here about 90% of the way down)
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States

The Top Tax Rate - ( its history )

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[Octafish]

4. Kick!

The larger answer, however, is that extreme concentration of income is incompatible with real democracy. Can anyone seriously deny that our political system is being warped by the influence of big money, and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows ever larger?

[Kaleko]

6. Denial is rampant.

But the squeeze is getting harder to ignore when it hits a million more families with every passing week.

Bonus quote for our resident obfuscators: :)

“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.
When you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled ­, one way or another,
by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.­"

- President James Garfield - assassinat­ed in 1881 shortly after making this statement

[nashville_brook]

5. big k and r

[Uncle Joe]

7. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Hissyspit.

[WCGreen]

8. So the mass of people living on the 20% don't feel as if they have a stake

in the economy, what could possibly go wrong said the Mad Hatter to the Red Queen...

[Brother Buzz]

9. One could make the argument we are already experiencing Democracy in name only

have been for decades in my opinion.