Political Cartoons

Well, pretty much any of Paul Krugman's blog entries do that pretty effectively. This piece in the WSJ is just another installement of a series of defending the one percent. A lot James Piereson's piece is the most recent in a series of such pieces by conservatives that are basically trying to reframe the discussion. (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/iron-men-of-wall-street/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body) And since James Piereson framed his case in a rather self serving manner, and whines that discussions regarding income inequality are really nothing but a distraction from the "failure of Obama care!" was laughably predictable.

As Krugman notes in the linked entry (some of the same points raised by James Piereson have been raised before by Greg Mankiw).

One more thing: Mankiw argues that our tax system is fair because the top 0.1 percent pays a higher share of income in federal taxes than the middle class. This neglects the partial offset of this progressivity by regressive state and local taxes. But surely the main point is that to the extent that taxes on the 0.1 percent are high (they aren’t really, in historical context) that’s largely because Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election, so that Obama’s partial rollback of the Bush tax cuts and the high-income surcharges that partially finance health reform remained in place and the Ryan budget didn’t happen. It’s kind of funny to claim that our system is fair thanks to policies that you and your friends tried desperately to kill.

Anyway, the wolves of Wall Street are more Gordon Gekko than Iron Man; if they’re the best argument you have for the justice of extreme inequality, you’re not doing too well.

The critique falls along three lines. First, as Dean Baker notes, even if you believe that the glittering prizes at the top of the economic scale were fairly won, the size of those prizes is very much defined by policy choices. We live in a society that allocates rights to intellectual property in a way that yields huge rewards to a select few, that taxes top incomes at a historically low rate, and so on. Even if the game is fair, nothing says that the game has to look the way it does.

Also see: Greg Mankiw and the Gatsby Curve. (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/22/greg-mankiw-and-the-gatsby-curve/)