The problem with Income Inequity

The problem with Income Inequity

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/opinion/krugman-rich-mans-recovery.html

"A few days ago, The Times published a report on a society that is being undermined by extreme inequality. "

" that the gap between the society's meritocratic ideology and its increasingly oligarchic reality is having a deeply demoralizing effect."
It is the oligarchy, not the income inequity that is to blame. The democrat party's participation in crony capitalism is more to blame. Rich Progressives trying to replace the normal mechanisms with their influence is to blame.

"An aside: These numbers should (but probably won't) finally kill claims that rising inequality is all about the highly educated doing better than those with less training. Only a small fraction of college graduates make it into the charmed circle of the 1 percent. Meanwhile, many, even most, highly educated young people are having a very rough time. They have their degrees, often acquired at the cost of heavy debts, but many remain unemployed or underemployed, while many more find that they are employed in jobs that make no use of their expensive educations. The college graduate serving lattes at Starbucks is a cliché, but he reflects a very real situation."

It is the small number that make it to the 1% that drive the engine of American exceptionalism . That people are having a rough time is not a problem. The liberal tend to remove rough times is more of a problem. Rising inequity is also not a problem if there remains a path for the able and the gifted. The rich now have so much, that the near rich have an equal chance and the poor who are not captives of liberal disincentives, have a sufficient chance, if they are driven.

" In any case, however, whatever is causing the growing concentration of income at the top, the effect of that concentration is to undermine all the values that define America. Year by year, we're diverging from our ideals. Inherited privilege is crowding out equality of opportunity; the power of money is crowding out effective democracy.

So what can be done? For the moment, the kind of transformation that took place under the New Deal — a transformation that created a middle-class society, not just through government programs, but by greatly increasing workers' bargaining power — seems politically out of reach. But that doesn't mean we should give up on smaller steps, initiatives that do at least a bit to level the playing field."

On these last two points, Klugman is 180 deg from reality. Government didn't make America exceptional, and it was already exceptional in the 1700's. The power of money is trapping the american people into complacency- government money. The mechanism of the big money is to control government and the solution is to remove the government's levers of control, so they can't be used by big money.

In summary: a society is being undermined by non exceptional people forcing their will on the public in place of the traditional mechanisms of the american "shining city on the hill"