Malign Neglect #1

Much of the obsessive attention directed at the Trump administration centers on Trump, not on administration. But more important than what he’s tweeting may be what he is neglecting to do from incompetence, cluelessness, apathy, laziness or sheer bloody-minded contempt for democratic government.

Two recent publications draw attention to this nine-tenths of the Trump iceberg that is out of sight. Today, I want to draw your attention to a study that was forwarded me to Doug Marsh of Denver. It can be found at gabriel-zucman.eu under the heading: “Distributional National Accounts.”

If that sounds a bit dense, it is. In fact, it’s a 51-page scholarly paper by economics professors Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. But do not despair, you can get the alarming gist from the abstract at the beginning and the conclusions and mind-blowing charts and graphs at the end.

Piketty, of course, is the author of the surprise bestseller of 2013 “Capital in the 21st Century.” Despite the title, it was actually a study of the forces creating a growing concentration of wealth at the top, the societal risks it poses and the possible remedies. Thanks to the light it directed at economic inequality, the subject became a campaign issue in 2016. Bernie Sanders made it a centerpiece of his insurgent run, and Donald Trump’s working class voters are its victims.

Since solutions tend to involve government policies to ameliorate inequality, including progressive taxation and redistributive entitlements, Republicans were quick to criticize Piketty as one of those European socialists and to fault his data and his solutions as they applied to the United States.

This paper, which studies wealth distribution in the United States between 1946 and 2014, answers those critics. In doing so, the authors count all income comprehensively, not just wages and benefits, but unearned income like capital gains as well as government transfers.

The data shows in stark detail how lopsided the wealth distribution is in this country and how it has become more so over the time period studied. So, as of 2014, the bottom 50% of adults over twenty earned 12.5% of all income, the bottom 20% (46 million people) subsisted on a scant 1.7%, an average of $5,400 a year. Even the top 90% (200 million adults) only accounted for 53% of all income, which left 47% of all income to the top 10%. The top one percent (2.3 million people) earned 20% of all income, more than the bottom 50%.

This profile of a plutocratic few and a struggling many is troubling enough, but the authors show that the plight of the bottom 90%, who average $36,000 a year or less, would be far worse if it weren’t for government programs including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the earned income tax credit, food stamps and many more that address the needs of the poor, the working class, the shrinking middle class, the ill, disabled and elderly.

Yet those are just the programs that the anti-government Paul Ryan right targets for elimination. And Trump, who ran as the white knight of the left-behind classes, seems ready to go along with this destructive plan.

The paper also divides the period studied into two 34-year blocks — 1946-1980 and 1981-2014. Doing so demonstrates dramatically what went wrong during this period. In the post-World War II years, programs comprising the social safety net were enacted or extended and lessened inequality, but in the years beginning with the so-called Reagan Revolution, which set out to dismantle those safeguards, inequality has exploded.

Unfortunately, few of the 200 million adults who are victims of this process will ever read this paper or understand the role that government actions and inactions have had in changing their material circumstances, first for the better and then for the worse.

Next time, a must-read from Michael Lewis on a government department that quietly protects all of our lives, and how the Trump administration is fecklessly on track to destroy it, and possbly many of our lives along wth it. The motto for the Trump regime might as well be: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.” Except these wanton boys aren’t gods, but human, all too human clay.

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