Posted on 03/06/2011 4:48:19 AM PST by mmanager
ST. LOUIS • It was late morning at the coffee shop, and the professor wanted to talk about rich people.
Mark Rank usually focuses his attention on the low end of the income charts, on poverty. As a professor of social welfare at Washington University, he's considered a top academic expert on that topic and social justice.
But he was moved to join a reporter here, at a back table of Kayak's Coffee across the street from his school, to talk about income inequality because of an interview in last Sunday's Post-Dispatch with Thomas A. Garrett, a St. Louis Federal Reserve vice president and economist. Garrett wrote a paper titled, "U.S. Income Inequality: It's Not So Bad," which argues that the rich's getting richer doesn't make the poor any poorer.
It doesn't matter, Garrett argues, that the distance between the rich and everyone else, from the middle class on down, stands at its widest point since the 1920s Gilded Age. "My point is, the social ills that are the result of having a low income are not because other people have more," he says. "It's because those at the bottom don't have enough income. The resource pie is not fixed. If I make more than you, it's not that I've taken it from you."
(Excerpt) Read more at stltoday.com ...
Their job is to produce wealth "for the nation?"
I didn't know Michael Moore was a Freeper!
Oh, darn. You got me.
Wow. How much does that gig pay?
Probably not at the low end of the income charts I'm guessing.
Do the rich deserve all that money? Yes, if they came by it honestly. In America, money can be made for those of the industrious and innovative nature. Those who are not such are destined to sell their skills to best producer he can. As for the poor? "Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money.
Francisco’s Money Speech should be required reading in every high school.
“over 50% of the people have no idea what an income tax is in this country, is that fair?”
That’s the 50% that should be paying it all!!!
They’re the ones sucking their existance from the government!
The problem is that now we privatize profits and socialize losses. Execs are not on the hook for bad decisions, as it should be in a true market-driven economy.
Indeed it should be, I just had a rip roaring good bar chat on Friday night with a liberal acquaintance regarding this speech. I argued that the speech actually presents the survival of the fittest and sustainable capitalism. And that kind of capitalism is the only kind of sustainable development.
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