Stephen Colbert offers a great economic analysis of income disparities in his “The Word” segment from March 1st.
The main focus of the segment is on income disparities in the U.S., starting with a recent Mother Jones issue which called the U.S. economy a “Vampire Economy.” Mother Jones also provides a neat webpage with “eleven charts that explain everything that’s wrong with America.” The same Word segment also references the January 2011 Atlantic article called “The Rise of the New Global Elite” and points out the fact that nearly half of the members of the U.S. Congress are millionaires.
This is an impressive amalgamation of important economic data presented in an extremely entertaining way.
I always am troubled by the focus on “disparity” rather than on poverty. It is as though the real problem is too many rich people, when in fact, the problem is too many poor people.
There are two ways to “close the gap”: Bring down the rich or bring up the poor, and it seems far too much attention is devoted to bringing down the rich (via taxes, income limitations, etc.)
Rather than focusing on the gap, which merely devolves to class warfare, we should focus on helping the poor. So what if 1/2 the members of Congress are millionaires? Is that a bad thing? I wish 100% of Congresspeople were rich, and I also wish there was no poverty in America — no matter what the gap.
The implied Marxist belief that there is a limited amount of assets in the world, so the way to help the poor is to soak the rich, is counterproductive and foolish. And anyone who writes such articles does great harm to everyone, rich or poor.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
[...] Here’s a link to Stephen Colbert’s segment on inequality: “New Country for Old Men” [ht: kd]. [...]
That was a really fun piece..