Gilded Once More

[rodeodance]

http://wealthyfrenchman.blogspot.com/

Friday, April 27, 2007
Gilded Once More

By PAUL KRUGMAN

One of the distinctive features of the modern American right has been nostalgia for the late 19th century, with its minimal taxation, absence of regulation and reliance on faith-based charity rather than government social programs. Conservatives from Milton Friedman to Grover Norquist have portrayed the Gilded Age as a golden age, dismissing talk of the era’s injustice and cruelty as a left-wing myth.

Well, in at least one respect, everything old is new again. Income inequality — which began rising at the same time that modern conservatism began gaining political power — is now fully back to Gilded Age levels.

Consider a head-to-head comparison. We know what John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in Gilded Age America, made in 1894, because in 1895 he had to pay income taxes. (The next year, the Supreme Court declared the income tax unconstitutional.) His return declared an income of $1.25 million, almost 7,000 times the average per capita income in the United States at the time.

But that makes him a mere piker by modern standards. Last year, according to Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine, James Simons, a hedge fund manager, took home $1.7 billion, more than 38,000 times the average income. Two other hedge fund managers also made more than $1 billion, and the top 25 combined made $14 billion.

[deutsey]

1. It's obvious the right is attempting to erase all the progressive gains made in 20th century

and return us to our gilded cages.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. Ah, the gilded age

Where one of my great great grandfathers committed suicide because his only daughter-caretaker had died and he had no money to take care of himself-he had some sort of wasting disease.

Where one of my great grandfathers was killed in a coal mine because there was little or no safety precautions at the time.

Where people were sent to the poor farm when they couldn't support themselves anymore and had no family member to take care of them.

Where people who were injured in factories were fired and left to starve.

Where orphan trains took children without parents (or whose mothers let them go because they were illegitimate)to other areas, where they were often treated like slaves.

Where women had little or no rights--they couldn't have their own banking accounts in many states, and it was perfectly ok to beat and mistreat them, as long as they were your wife or child.

And I won't even go into how blacks and other minorities were exploited or the First Americans were slaughtered and the survivors denied the right to practice their religion.

Oh yes. Let's go back to the Gilded Age.