Raise the Minimum Wage? What Are You, a Nazi?

“Because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany.  You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.”

Ken Langone, billionaire founder of Home Depot and huge Republican donor, on income inequality.

So if you hate carried interest and want to raise the minimum wage and extend unemployment benefits, well, heil to you, you despicable Nazi.

We’re going to give the Senate back to these people in November?  Really?  But of course they’re emboldened — they brought down our whole economy and no one went to jail.

Libor Elicits a Shrug and a Yawn

We’re so used to financial shenanigans that we’ve reached the “So what else is new?” stage.  From “The Spreading Scourge of Corporate Corruption,” Eduardo Porter, NYT:

“Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Libor scandal is how familiar it seems.  Sure, for some of the world’s leading banks to try to manipulate one of the most important interest rates in contemporary finance is clearly egregious.  but is that worse than packaging billions of dollars worth of dubious mortgages into a bond and having it stamped with a Triple-A rating to sell to some dupe down the road while betting against it?  Or how about forging documents on an industrial scale to foreclose fraudulently on countless homeowners?

“The misconduct of the financial industry no longer surprises most Americans.  Only about one in five has much trust in banks, according to Gallup polls, about half the level in 2007. … Sixty-two percent of Americans believe corruption is widespread across corporate America.

“The inexorable rise of income inequality is also likely to encourage fraud, fostering resentment and undermining trust in capitalism’s institutions and rules.  Economic research shows that participants in contests in which the winner takes all are much more likely to cheat.  And the Unites States is becoming a winner-takes-all economy.”

Why Is a Strong Middle Class So Essential for Everyone Else?

It’s striking that we are so focused on building a strong middle class everywhere in the world, that we see it as the magic bullet that solves threats and problems — except here at home.

When we invaded Iraq, we were assured that one of the things in our favor for building a democracy there was the existence of a strong, educated middle class.  By contrast, we’ve been told over and over that one of the reasons for the tough, fruitless slog in Afghanistan is the lack of a middle class.

We’ve been told that one of the reasons the Islamists have been able to emerge strong from the Arab Spring is the lack of a middle class in the Middle East, that a tiny group of very rich people has ruled over an enormous group of very poor, uneducated people for so long.

We’ve been told that the emerging middle classes in India and China are a wonderful thing for the growth of world trade and prosperity and stability.

But here at home, our middle class is suffering and shrinking.  And we’re told that the growing chasm of income inequality, that the falling back of so many families into poverty, that the failure of so many children to do better than their parents as they have historically, is nothing to be alarmed about.

Can someone explain this?  Mitt?  Reince? Paul Ryan?  John Boehner? Anybody?

The Danger and Damage of Extreme Income Inequality

From “Plutocracy, Paralysis, Perplexity,” Paul Krugman, NYT:

“If something like the financial crisis of 2008 had occurred in, say, 1971 — the year Richard Nixon declared that ‘I am now a Keynsian in economic policy’ — Washington would probably have responded fairly effectively.  There would have been a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of strong action, and there would also have been wide agreement about what kind of action was needed.

“But that was then.  Today, Washington is marked by a combination of bitter partisanship and intellectual confusion — and both are, I would argue, largely the result of extreme income equality.

“For the past century, political polarization has closely tracked income inequality, and there’s every reason to believe that the relationship is causal.  Specifically, money buys power, and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties, in the process destroying any prospect for cooperation.

“Disputes in economics used to be bounded by a shared understanding of the evidence, creating a broad range of agreement about economic policy. … Now, however, the Republican Party is dominated by doctrines formerly on the political fringe.

“And why is the GOP so devoted to these doctrines regardless of facts and evidence?  It surely has a lot to do with the fact that billionaires have always loved the doctrines in question, which offer a rationale for policies that serve their interests. … And now the same people effectively own a whole political party.

“Many pundits assert that the U. S. economy has big structural problems that will prevent any quick recovery.  All the evidence, however, points to a simple lack of demand, which could and should be cured very quickly through a combination of fiscal and monetary stimulus.

“No, the real structural problem is in our political system, which has been warped and paralyzed by the power of a small, wealthy minority.  And the key to economic recovery lies in finding a way to get past that minority’s malign influence.”  Emphasis added.

I think it’s obvious that if Mitt wins, this problem won’t get better.