If you read anything at all of The Gadfly's musings in the coming four or five days, dear readers, read this article in the New Yorker about the issue of income inequality and what it has been doing to the country and what it portends for our national economic future.
For a long time, that debate was almost entirely focussed on what was happening to median incomes. That inevitably led to discussions of globalization, skill-biased technical change, and policies focussed on education and retraining. Now, thanks to Piketty et al., the remarkable gains of those at the very top can’t be avoided. And this means that the issues of politics and redistribution can’t be avoided either.http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2014/03/piketty-looks-at-inequality-in-six-charts.html
The Gadfly knows (and gets it) that most of you are not really in to looking at charts and listening to policy wonkers wonk about policies, but this truly does demonstrate precisely how the 1% crowd has made out like proverbial fucking bandits, not only in the run up to, but also in the aftermath of the 2008 world financial crisis.
And that's not all - it also demonstrates how the American middle class has, for all intents and purposes, been deliberately kneecapped, and if the Koch brothers and the Tea Party get their way, in another decade or so, the U.S. middle class will be an unrecoverable relic of a bygone era -- and we will basically be left with a two class economic system in this country - the haves it all and the have not shit.
It really is fascinating stuff. The Gadfly only wishes there were a way to make reading this kind of information as appealing as watching a SpongeBob Squarepants episode -- but alas -- it is what it is.
Read it and then ponder the ramifications of your children and grandchildren not knowing what a middle class is when they are of mid-life working age.
----TFG
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