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I wonder what the powers at be are up to?
The United States may be on course to becoming a “Downton Abbey” economy. There are valid causes for concern about inequality: sharp increases in the share of income going to the top 1 percent of earners, a rising share of income going to profits, stagnant real wages and a rising gap between productivity growth and growth in median family incomes. A generation ago, it could have been asserted that the economy’s overall growth rate was the dominant determinant of growth in middle-class incomes and progress in reducing poverty. This is no longer a plausible claim.
Issues associated with an increasingly unequal distribution of economic rewards are likely to be with us long after cyclical conditions have normalized and budget deficits have been addressed.
Those who condemn President Obama’s concern about inequality as “tearing down the wealthy” and un-American populism have, to put it politely, limited historical perspective. Consider some past presidential rhetoric:
Franklin Roosevelt said of the financial industry in his first inaugural address: “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion . . . they know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. . . . and when there is no vision the people perish.” In 1936, Roosevelt asserted that “we had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking. . . . They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred.”
Harry Truman observed: “The Wall Street reactionaries are not satisfied with being rich. . . . They want a return of the Wall Street economic dictatorship.”
I wonder what the powers at be are up to?
The United States may be on course to becoming a “Downton Abbey” economy. There are valid causes for concern about inequality: sharp increases in the share of income going to the top 1 percent of earners, a rising share of income going to profits, stagnant real wages and a rising gap between productivity growth and growth in median family incomes. A generation ago, it could have been asserted that the economy’s overall growth rate was the dominant determinant of growth in middle-class incomes and progress in reducing poverty. This is no longer a plausible claim.
Issues associated with an increasingly unequal distribution of economic rewards are likely to be with us long after cyclical conditions have normalized and budget deficits have been addressed.
Those who condemn President Obama’s concern about inequality as “tearing down the wealthy” and un-American populism have, to put it politely, limited historical perspective. Consider some past presidential rhetoric:
Franklin Roosevelt said of the financial industry in his first inaugural address: “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion . . . they know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. . . . and when there is no vision the people perish.” In 1936, Roosevelt asserted that “we had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking. . . . They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred.”
Harry Truman observed: “The Wall Street reactionaries are not satisfied with being rich. . . . They want a return of the Wall Street economic dictatorship.”
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