Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy
Wall Street, but with an assist from the Congressional Budget Office. And you
know what that means: It’s time to roll out the obfuscators!
Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I
mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a
reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out
reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t
matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that
it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the
less educated.
So what you need to know is that all of these claims are
basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which
money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which
that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in
name only. -More-
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