Income Inequality Is a Symptom, Not the Disease

Go read this whole thing from the master, Charles P. Pierce.--SS

Income Inequality Is a Symptom, Not the Disease:

(Optional soundtrack to this blog post...)

On the front page of the business section in today's New York Times, poverty and class reporter Jason DeParle applies the Timesian massage to the news that the recession has put something of a crimp in the incomes of the upper one percent of our fellow Americans and that, because their income has "slipped," on average, from $1.4 million a year in 2007 to $957,000 in 2009, the problem of income inequality in this country is getting better all the time. Actually, DeParle doesn't say that. He gets an economist from the University of Chicago to say that, which is the way you do things when discussing them in the judicious, Timesian way. This, of course, forces the reader to ignore the fact that the University of Chicago is the home office for the Pauperhood Is Good For You school of economic analysis. It is quite possibly the last bastion of American feudalism. I think they drink mead out of the skulls of lesser men. Anyway, and so forth, to wit:

"It's very interesting that this has become such a big topic now when the numbers are back to where they were in the 1990s," said Steven Kaplan, an economist at the University of Chicago's business school. "People didn't seem to be complaining about it then."

Readers of this blog are familiar with its basic thinking on our current economic state of affairs. It is summed up in our slogan, which the gang down in marketing ran by several focus groups made up of people who couldn't get into one of Frank Luntz's focus groups because the Doritos ran out...

Much more after the jump