Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Linkages

Objecting to the Columbia Free Trade deal - Murder, Inequality, Corporate Profits, and Free Trade Go Together (Naked Capitalism):
Here’s the AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka’s mild  and private (subsequently leaked) objection to the trade agreement.
Mr. Trumka noted that many Colombian employers continued to subcontract work in what he said was an illegal strategy to block unionization. He wrote that after municipal workers in the city of Jamundí began a unionization effort in January, the city fired 43 workers, two union leaders received threats, and one activist, Miguel Mallama, “was gunned down in the streets on March 25.”

A Catholic Grapples with Burkhauser's "debunking" of rising inequality (U.S. Catholic)
What I see is a lot of smoke and mirrors. The AEI graphic shows that wages for the lowest 20 percent have dropped by an astonishing one third since 1979; once you account for changes in household size (households have gotten smaller) and public support ("transfers") such as the earned income tax credit and the cost of health insurance, the earnings of the bottom 20 percent have "risen" by 26 percent.
...What is clear to me is that, for the most part, government subsidies (the earned income tax credit especially) are just barely making up for that 33 percent wage loss the bottom 20 percent have sufferred since 1979. In other words, the government is directly subsdizing low wages, and therefore directly subsidizing employers by allowing their wage costs to actually go down by one third...the bottom line is, if you cut further from the government support that keeps the bottom 20 percent afloat, already struggling people are going to get poorer.

The Wall Street Journal is definitely still a Murdoch paper: The Inequality Obsession (Wall Street Journal):
Income inequality is a strange obsession, at least to the extent the obsessives focus their policy responses on trying to adjust the condition of the top 1% rather than improving the opportunities of everyone else.
Income inequality could be a sign of real pathology in authoritarian societies where entrenched groups use government-granted privileges to protect themselves from competition. By and large, that's not the case in the U.S., where most see the market actually increasing the competitive advantages of the educated, skilled, hardworking and talented.
...
One can only wonder how much faster progress on tax reform or school choice would have been if the political capital devoted to income inequality had been devoted to fighting entrenched institutional resistance to useful reforms.
...
One factor is a certain human soul-sickness that's impossible to put a constructive gloss on... How society stimulates the creation and distribution of income is an important topic—so important that one could wish it were less infected with the pathology Freud diagnosed as "group spirit" and which he said was ultimately founded on envy.
As Freud put it, "Everyone must be the same and have the same. Social justice means we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as well."

No comments:

Post a Comment