Imaginary Squabbles Part 4: Krugman and DeLong on the Top 1 Percent

Alan Reynolds In End This Depression Now! (pages 77-78) Paul Krugman offers the strangest arguments I have seen.   The story opens with familiar fulminations about the “top 1 percent” (those earning more than $366,623 in 2011).  As he put it in a 2011 column, “income inequality in America really is about oligarchs versus everyone else.” “Incomes of the rich,” his book claims, “are at the heart of what has been happening to America’s economy and society.”  Yet it apparently requires great bravery to even dare to mention “the rising incomes” of the top 1 percent or top 0.1 percent: Merely to raise the issue was to enter a political war zone: income distribution at the top is one of those areas where anyone who raises his head above the parapet will encounter fierce attacks from what amount to hired guns protecting the interests of the wealthy.  For example, a few years ago Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez … found themselves under fire from Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute, who has spent decades arguing that inequality hasn’t really increased; every time one of his arguments is thoroughly debunked, he pops up with another. To be called a “hired gun” of the wealthy might be insulting if it was not so ridiculous.  First of all, no employer has ever tried to influence what I write.  Second, I have been a very successful investor and live quite comfortably from realized capital gains plus mandatory distribution...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Source Type: blogs