Permanent Inequality

Income inequality has been rising in the United States.  A paper submitted to the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity analyzes tax returns from 1987 to 2009 to show that changes in inequality are increasingly permanent rather than transitory.  This means it is harder for someone to bounce back from a bad year for income.

In his book Applied Economics, Thomas Sowell cited statistics from 1991 in support of income mobility.  An important part of the American creed is the notion of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.  The new paper suggests this may no longer be as easy as it might have been. Editor and University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers is quoted:

The rich are getting richer and staying richer.  The poor are getting poorer and staying poorer.

Iraq

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq by the United States.  The hysteria following the September 11th attacks provided the cover for a war that had been planned since the very start of George W. Bush's administration.

In a sane world, Bush at the very least would have been defeated for re-election or else impeached and convicted in Congress.  But none have been held accountable for this crime.

Update (March 23):  Well deserved snark from the sharpest blogger around.  And Glenn Greenwald reacts to former Bush speechwriter David Frum's admission that oil was a major factor behind starting the war.

Update (March 28):  Dahr Jamail reports on how Iraqis view their future.  Larry Everest lists some grim statics from the war.

Update (January 3, 2014):  The year 2013 was the deadliest for Iraq since the peak violence of 2008. Over 9000 civilians and security forces were killed last year.

Update (June 10, 2014):  Deaths continue to rise and insurgents seized control of Mosul.

Update (June 13, 2014):  I'm not going to link to someone's suggestion that it was a mistake to withdraw from Iraq.  No, the mistake was invading in the first place.  From Jay Bookman:

The ignorance, callous indifference and arrogance of [the war] strategy continues to boggle the mind. And now, 11 years later, with chaos descending, there is almost nothing that we can do to stop or contain it.

Update (June 18, 2014):  Patrick Smith analyzes the failure of U.S. policy and concludes that the only solution is a negotiated political settlement among all parties.

The reality may again seem grim, but we ought to know by now there is grim and grimmer.

Update (July 11, 2016):  The Chilcot report is critical of British involvement in the Iraq War, but makes no conclusion on legality.

Heather Digby Parton reminds us that George W. Bush lied constantly about justification for the war.

There were many large and small lies for months on end. My personal favorite is a small one but it’s the one that best illustrates the “you can believe me or you can believe your lyin’ eyes” tactic. In July of 2003, President Bush said this:

“[W]e gave [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power….”

This is completely wrong. Hussein did let U.N. weapons inspectors in, and they failed to find any weapons. The administration withdrew them so they could begin the invasion.

Calvin Exoo says the report doesn't nearly go far enough and contrasts what was said with what was known at the time. One example:

What they said: Saddam Hussein is "aggressively seeking nuclear weapons" (Cheney). Iraq attempted to acquire aluminum tubes that were "only really suited for nuclear weapons development" (Condoleeza Rice). The US has "irrefutable evidence" that the tubes were destined for centrifuges (Cheney). "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" (Rice).

What they knew: Department of Energy scientists had concluded that these tubes were the wrong size for centrifuges, but were the proper size for conventional, non-WMD rockets. Post-war CIA inspectors concluded that, indeed, the tubes had been used for this purpose and were, in inspectors' words, "innocuous."

And Juan Cole is clear that this wasn't just about lies or that the outcome was a disaster. This was an illegal war.

[I]t is the [United Nations] Security Council that decides if an international trouble spot should be responded to by war. The Chilcot Report shows that George W. Bush had no intention of even seeking a UNSC authorization, and Tony Blair was among those (along with then Secretary of State Colin Powell) who convinced Bush that just falling on Iraq with no pretense of an international process would look bad.

Some would argue that sometimes in the real world the UNSC gets hung up because of the veto of the 5 permanent members, and you have to go around it. But in this case, Bush couldn’t even get NATO to want to go around it. There was no consensus. Bush met with Blair and the Portuguese and Spanish presidents before launching his war, because apparently those were the only European countries he could find to support him.

So that’s it. You don’t need anything else. The Iraq War was an act of pure aggression, no different in moral or legal standing from Hitler’s invasion of Poland. That is what Bush and Blair made themselves. Small Hitlers, betraying all the hopes of the generation of 1945, which dreamed of forestalling further such atrocities.

The Bush-Blair war of aggression in turn authorized many others, and other countries have sometimes openly cited the Iraq War as justification for their own belligerence, or as proof that the West lacks legitimacy when it criticizes the aggression of others. To the hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq, the millions wounded or displaced, must be added the toll from the “wars of choice” W. unleashed on the world.

Update (March 15, 2018):  Mel Goodman warns about the lessons of Iraq.

It is particularly important to do so at this time because [von Clownstick] has talked about a military option against North Korea or Iran (or Venezuela for that matter). Since there is no cause to justify such wars, it is quite likely that politicized intelligence would once again be used to provide a justification for audiences at home and abroad.

Update (March 18, 2018):  Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies estimate the Iraqi death toll over the past 15 years as 2.4 million people.

Free Markets

Steven Pearlstein asks, "Is Capitalism Moral?"  He expands on the liberty vs. equality debate and suggests that our political stalemate results from the failure to hash out these arguments. He concludes

If our moral obligation is to provide everyone with a reasonable shot at economic success within a market system that, by its nature, thrives on unequal outcomes, then we ought to ask not just whether government is doing too much or too little, but whether it is doing the right things.

However, Dean Baker points out that markets don't just "naturally" redistribute income to the wealthy.  Government policies have been deliberately implemented over the past thirty years to promote that redistribution.   In other words, the rich have been able to use the government to do the wrong things.

Update (October 24, 2015):  The Washington Post investigated the claim that the bottom 90 percent of wage earners have not seen any real income growth over thirty years. The claim overlooks the impact of government policy according to research by lead author Richard Burkhauser of Cornell University.

[D]uring the Great Recession, government tax and transfer programs dramatically cushioned the decline in market income of the middle and bottom part of the income distribution. “When you measure properly the role of government, you get the fullest measure of income distribution,” [Burkhauser] said. “Government is doing its job. That’s the story. I don’t understand why the liberals don’t celebrate this.”

Warmest Global Temperatures in 4000 Years

New research headed by Shaun Marcott at Oregon State University has extended the famous "hockey stick" graph of temperature change.  Not only was a long term cooling trend reversed, the recent warming is at a much faster rate of change than the previous warming trend during the early Holocene period.

ClimateProgress.org illustrates how this temperature record compares to projected temperature by the end of the century.

Update (April 2):  The authors answer questions in response to critics.

Update (September 22):  Stefan Rahmstorf comments on the end of the Holocene.  He includes a temperature reconstruction back to the peak of the last glaciation with a moderate three degree warming projection.

Wealth Inequality in America

My fifth post reproduced a chart comparing Americans' perception of the distribution of wealth with a desired distribution and the actual distribution.  The video below (highlighted in two Daily Kos diaries today) asks viewers to wake up to the notion that reality is not at all what we think it is.

Update (June 1):  Stewart Lansley writes about the shrinking middle class in the United States.

The Influence of the Affluent

A report from Demos is titled Stacked Deck:  How the Dominance of Politics by the Affluent and Business Undermines Economic Mobility in America.  It discusses how the rich have different priorities than the rest of us and how they have greater means for shaping policy.  Remedies include limiting money in politics, make it easier to vote, reduce economic inequality, and make corporations more responsive to the public interest.

Update (December 14):  Bill Moyers on the dangers of the unrestrained influence of wealth.

Update (April 5, 2014):  There's an interesting juxtaposition between a recent Supreme Court ruling removing the donation cap to candidates in an election cycle and Republican efforts to restrict voting in the name of non-existent voter fraud.  Jon Stewart made the point in "Donors Unchained".  It is astonishing--rich people are "free" to spend millions of dollars on as many candidates as they choose, but a poor person better have their damn voter ID or they're not even going to be allowed to vote.

Update (May 12, 2014):  Brad Friedman is hopeful that we've reach peak Republican "voter fraud" fraud.

Update (August 29, 2014):  Justin Levitt of the Loyola University Law School uncovers a voter fraud rate of approximately 0.0000031 percent over a fourteen year period.

Update (July 27, 2015):  Sean McElwee reports on research showing that the donor class is richer, whiter, and mostly male. Their disproportionate influence often works against the public interest. The solution is greater voter participation and public financing.

Update (July 17, 2020):  Matthew Rozsa describes a study by L. Taylor Phillips and Brian S. Lowery.

[I]n the United States, people are conditioned to believe that we live in a meritocracy and to attribute success or failure primarily to one's talent and hard work. When members of the upper-middle or upper class are confronted with evidence that class privilege plays a major role in determining socioeconomic status, their self-regard is challenged. To maintain their sense of self-worth, they will exaggerate their own hardships or focus on the amount of work they do — even though class privilege does not preclude the reality of non-class related hardships and many people work very hard without achieving socioeconomic mobility.

Fortunately not all wealthy people are seek to justify their privilege.

A group of more than 80 self-described "millionaires for humanity" came together to urge governments across the globe to tax them and other ultra wealthy people to cover the immediate costs of the coronavirus pandemic and to build more equitable, just societies in the long term.

A letter is being circulated ahead of the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Governors meeting.

Today, we, the undersigned millionaires, ask our governments to raise taxes on people like us. Immediately. Substantially. Permanently.