The Death of Horatio Alger

[DuctapeFatwa]

The other day I found myself reading a leftist rag that made outrageous claims about America. It said that we are becoming a society in which the poor tend to stay poor, no matter how hard they work; in which sons are much more likely to inherit the socioeconomic status of their father than they were a generation ago.

The name of the leftist rag? Business Week...confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office--between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent..America was once a place of substantial intergenerational mobility: Sons often did much better than their fathers.


Now for the shocker: ... over the past generation upward mobility has fallen drastically. Very few children of the lower class are making their way to even moderate affluence. ..Suppose that you...were seeking ways to use your control of the government to further entrench the advantages of the haves against the have-nots. What would you do? ...get rid of the estate tax..reduce tax rates both on corporate profits and on unearned income..shifting the burden to the payroll tax...cut back on healthcare for the poor, on the quality of public education and on state aid for higher education....break the power of unions, and you'd privatize government functions so that well-paid civil servants could be replaced with poorly paid private employees....

current policies will eventually create "a class of rentiers in the U.S., whereby a small group of wealthy but untalented children controls vast segments of the US economy and penniless, talented children simply can't compete." If he's right--and I fear that he is--we will end up suffering not only from injustice, but from a vast waste of human potential.

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040105&s=krugman

[burrowowl]

1. Well DUH!

Business Week should read that other 'leftest' Kevin Philips: Wealth and Democracy.

[RBHam]

2. Well, it is the plan after all

The editorial board must have been laughing their ass off at this guy's naivete.