James Pethokoukis doesn’t find the income inequality talk particularly convincing, and has a few reasons why:
Sorry, the story just doesn’t hold together. According to left-wing think tanks, columnist and bloggers — and, of course, the Occupy Wall Street radicals — the top 1 percent have been exploiting the 99 percent for decades. The rich have been getting richer at the expense of the middle class and poor.
Really? Just think for a second: If inequality had really exploded during the past 30 to 40 years, why did American politics simultaneously move rightward toward a greater embrace of free-market capitalism? Shouldn’t just the opposite have happened as beleaguered workers united and demanded a vastly expanded social safety net and sharply higher taxes on the rich? What happened to presidents Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry? Even Barack Obama ran for president as a market friendly, third-way technocrat.
Nope, the story doesn’t hold together because the financial facts don’t support it. And here’s why:
[. . .]
5. Set all the numbers aside for a moment. If you’ve lived through the past four decades, does it really seem like America is no better off today? It doesn’t to Jason Furman, the deputy director of Obama’s National Economic Council. Here is Furman back in 2006: “Remember when even upper-middle class families worried about staying on a long distance call for too long? When flying was an expensive luxury? When only a minority of the population had central air conditioning, dishwashers, and color televisions? When no one had DVD players, iPods, or digital cameras? And when most Americans owned a car that broke down frequently, guzzled fuel, spewed foul smelling pollution, and didn’t have any of the now virtually standard items like air conditioning or tape/CD players?”
No doubt the past few years have been terrible. But the past few decades have been pretty good—for everybody.
