Equality, Inequality, and other Mathematical Concepts Eugene Robinson Doesn't Understand

The study that shows why Occupy Wall Street struck a nerve

By Eugene Robinson, Published: October 27

The hard-right conservatives who dominate the Republican Party

It seems odd that Robinson doesn’t get that “right-wing” isn’t a pejorative in the way that “left-wing” is to most Americans. After all, the differences between the right and left have never been so stark. Conservatives clean up after themselves, tell you what they believe, and go to work in the morning. Liberals engage in weird chanting rituals, espouse complete incoherence, and eventually riot against a system they don’t even understand.

claim to despise the redistribution of wealth,

Indeed we do.

but secretly they love it — as long as the process involves depriving the poor and middle class to benefit the rich, not the other way around.

If this is a class-war between the 99% and the 1%--as OWS protesters are so eager to assert--then how would any constituency of 1% retain power by bilking the 99%? This isn’t a riddle or an invitation to anticapitalist kookery; they wouldn’t. Indeed, you can’t make the assertion of 99% vs. 1% class warfare without veiled allusions to brainwashing and outright demagoguery. After all, why would anyone vote to be oppressed? 9/11 truthers (also almost all liberal) have a more grounded set of explanations than this.

What’s more, billionaires are generally not Republicans at all. How many liberal billionaires can you name off the top of your head? Bill Gates. Paul Allen. Warren Buffett. Michael Bloomberg. George Soros. Mark Zuckerburg. George Lucas, Steven Speilburg. The richest man in the world right now is Carlos Slim because American billionaires have been shedding wealth to whatever do-gooder charity they see.

How many conservative billionaires are there? The Koch brothers. Rupert Murdoch. Maybe Steve Wynn. Sort of/Kind of/Maybe Donald Trump, but he’s more of a populist/protectionist than anything. The blanket assertion that Republicans are synonymous with wealth is downright batty.

The truth of the matter is that the rich, even the super-rich, have mostly the same policy concerns that the rest of the country. They tend to skew towards social justice policies because the economics don’t have any threat of changing their economic standings whereas social awareness most assuredly has the ability to elevate their social cachet. What’s more, entrenched, established billionaires fear low-taxation and low-regulation policies (bedrocks of conservatism) that obliterate barriers to entry for competing new start-ups. The billionaires’ left-leaning tendencies aren’t mere coincidence, but the product of a web of incentives.

That is precisely what has been happening, as a jaw-dropping new report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office

It can’t be said enough: the CBO is nonpartisan, but being nonpartisan, it often makes demonstrably stupid assumptions that are demanded by politicians. It is particularly egregious when Democrats are setting the inputs.

demonstrates. Three decades of trickle-down economic theory,

Which hasn’t been implemented since the 80s.

see-no-evil deregulation

Which hasn’t been implemented ever.

and tax-cutting fervor

Which has absolutely nothing to do with income distribution.

have led to massive redistribution.

I don’t think Robinson really understands the concept of redistribution. Distribution of wealth is part of any economic system, and it happens every minute of every day. In capitalist societies, wealth is distributed through profits, incomes, expenses, investment gains and losses, and gifting—all results of voluntary contractual agreements.

Redistribution occurs when that regular distribution is altered to address social desires that are not reflected in the marketplace. In other words, redistribution is the act of arranging the outcome of economic activities before those activities occur. By asserting that the outcomes are somehow undesirable, you, Eugene Robinson, have made the argument for redistribution. This wouldn’t be surprising or even worth pointing out if not for the fact that you have dedicated this entire article to accusing Republican policies of redistributionism.

Another word for what’s been happening might be theft.

If you want to go there, you’re contractually obligated to stick to the “redistribution = theft” definition once your trite world-view is debunked.

The gist of the CBO study, titled “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007,” is that while we’ve become wealthier overall, these new riches have largely bypassed many Americans and instead flowed mostly to the affluent.

In the shock of the century, rich people have money!

Perhaps my memory is faulty, but I don’t remember voting to turn the United States into a nation starkly divided between haves and have-nots.

If your memory is faulty, it’s most likely the result of a more global brain damage, because that sentence has the intellectual acuity of a YouTube comments section. We have a representative Republic, which means that you don’t vote on how to distribute wealth; you vote on representatives. Moreover, the nation is not starkly divided between haves and have-nots, despite what the CBO report might say because “the rich” is not a monolithic and stagnant group of people. People flow in and out of income deciles rather freely. Consistently showing the top 1% as though the grouping were somehow meaningful is flagrant and particularly brazen selection bias.

Yet that’s where we’ve been led.

This is the danger of giving numbers to the mathematically illiterate. I’d feel safer around a child with a hand grenade.

Overall, in inflation-adjusted dollars, average after-tax household income grew by 62 percent during the period under study, according to the CBO. This sounds great — but only until you look a little closer.

For those at the bottom — the one-fifth of households with the lowest incomes — the increase was just 18 percent. For the middle three-fifths, the average increase was 40 percent. Spread over nearly 30 years, these gains are modest, not meteoric.

By contrast, look at the top 1 percent of earners. Their after-tax household income increased by an astonishing 275 percent. For those keeping track, this means it nearly quadrupled. Nice work, if you can get it.

I explained this above, but this entire analysis willfully misrepresents what the number actually means. Since the study didn’t actually track individual actors, it can’t represent that the 1% in 1979 is an entirely different dataset than the 1% in 2007. (I’m graciously ignoring that this study didn’t detail the crash of 2008.) Which means that by the definition of what constitutes the top 1%, no one in that group lost money, otherwise they would have fallen out of the top percentile and been counted elsewhere. Similarly, no one in the lowest decile made any money, or they wouldn’t have still been included in the lowest decile. Again, as a description of have-versus-have-nots, the data is about as useless as a yacht in New Mexico.

This is not what Republicans want you to think of when you hear the word redistribution.

We’ve already proved that Democrats are much better at distributing tax dollars to their campaign donors. (See: Solyndra et al.) We’ve also proved that Democrats are great at filtering federal funds through favored constituencies (unions) that then come back in the form of campaign contributions. If you’re asking why so many billionaires are Democrats, look no further.

You’re supposed to imagine the evil masterminds as Bolsheviks, not bankers.

“Mastermind” and “Bolshevik” haven’t been compatible terms since the fall of the Soviet Union. Indeed, Bolshevism precludes one from being a mastermind.

You’re supposed to envision the lazy free-riders who benefit from redistribution as the “poor,” and the industrious job-creators who get robbed as the “wealthy” — not the other way around.

Again, if this is all based off of a really shallow reading of a mathematically flawed analysis, then these assertions quickly become laughably inaccurate.

If Americans were to realize they’ve been the victims of Republican-style redistribution — stealing from the poor to give to the rich — the whole political atmosphere might change.

I let him slide on the “stealing” thing once, but theft requires the appropriation of goods from the rightful owner without consent. Robinson, for his part, wants to assert that the money rightfully belongs to the middle class just by virtue of them being middle class Americans. Whatever that ideology may be, it’s not capitalism.

I believe that’s one reason why the Occupy Wall Street protests have struck such a nerve.

That, and conservatives needing someone new to laugh at. Obama’s policies are too depressing to be a punching bag anymore.

The far-right and its media mouthpieces

I think it’s kind of stunning to liberal media figures that conservatives don’t have an equivalent apparatus. I think that’s why they get caught shadowboxing when they realize that their understanding of the American political spectrum is skewed left.

have worked themselves into a frenzy trying to disregard,

Why would we want to do that? This rabid hysteria is the best contrast against which we can present conservatism.

dismiss

Already done.

or discredit

This one they did to themselves.

the demonstrations. Thus far, fortunately, all this effort has been to no avail.

Seriously? There are Nazis in New York, calls for violence in Chicago, Communists everywhere, and riots in Oakland. (And that’s just off the top of my head. Imagine if I weren’t too lazy to do research.) This is the organization that you want to trumpet as a pillar of the American left?

The right maintains that inequality is the wrong measure.

Of course it is. Fairness is a function of both input and output. Looking at output alone necessarily misses the point.

To argue about how the income pie should be sliced is “class warfare,”

It sure is, you dirty socialist.

and what we should do instead is give the private sector the right incentives to make the pie bigger.

If by “give the right incentives” you mean “get the hell out of the way” then yeah, you’ve got it.

This way, according to conservative doctrine, everyone’s slice gets bigger — even if some slices grow faster than others.

In that sentence, reasonable people have found a reprieve from lunacy that is desperately needed.

Indeed, the CBO report says that even the poorest households saw at least a little income growth. Why is it any of their business that the high-earners in the top 1 percent saw astronomical income growth? Isn’t this just sour grapes?

No, for two reasons. First, the system is rigged. Wealthy individuals and corporations have disproportionate influence over public policy because of the often decisive role that money plays in elections.

And yet, liberals are the ones who want public policy to be more influential. Conservatives want less influential public policy. All of this is a function of the country getting more liberal—not more conservative, as Robinson suggests—over the time period of the CBO study he cites.

This is why I continue to insist that OWS is the larval stage of conservative thought.

If the rich and powerful act in their self-interest, as conservative ideologues believe we all should do, then the rich and powerful’s share of income will continue to soar.

That seems to indicate that those of us without bottomless pockets all have a vested interest in reducing the size and scope of government interest. Funny, that sounds a lot like the Republican platform.

Second, and more broadly, the real issue is what kind of nation we want to be. Thomas Jefferson’s “All men are created equal” is properly understood as calling for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes.

File this one under “no shit, you dirty socialist.”

But the more we become a nation of rich and poor,

Which is a silly assertion based on mathematical incompetence.

the less we can pretend to be offering the same opportunities to every American.

Dammit, you already screwed up Jefferson. The government doesn’t offer opportunities. Existence, unfettered by government meddling and lawlessness, guarantees opportunities. Everyone in the country has the right and the opportunity to drive a bus, or be an accountant, or enjoy a heroin addiction, or be a school teacher, or be a rodeo clown, or—heaven forbid—be a hedge fund manager. The difference is that there is a very specific set of skills that qualify one for any of these opportunities. (There are fewer skills required for heroin addiction, but needles are kind of tricky, I guess.) The great equalizer is that if you believe that the system has unfairly put up barriers between you and your vocation, you can always start a business.

By giving people control over their opportunities, it encourages people to develop skills and cultivate competence. In contrast, giving people an undeserved opportunity entrenches incompetence.

As polarization increases, mobility declines.

Except polarization hasn’t increased. The gulf between rich and poor is a function of mobility, not a symptom of a lack of mobility. The massively wealthy in this country didn’t all start out massively wealthy. That is the American Dream in action.

The whole point of the American Dream is that it is available to everyone, not just those who awaken from their slumbers on down-filled pillows and 800-thread-count sheets.

Fuck off, I like my sheets.

So it does matter that as the pie grows, the various slices do not grow in proportion.

You haven’t shown that at all. It’s a naked assertion, and a bad one, at that.

We’re not characters in one of those lumbering, interminable, nonsensical Ayn Rand novels.

Rand’s novels present flat characters because they are archetypes. The problem is that you are, very much, a character from a Rand novel: Ellisworth Toohey. I wouldn’t like the comparison either.

We believe in individual initiative and the free market,

[footage not found]

but we also believe that nationhood necessarily involves a commitment to our fellow citizens, an acknowledgment that we’re engaged in a common enterprise.

There is nothing in my enterprise that is common to a vagrant in San Diego or a billionaire in Boston. My enterprise is my own.

We believe that opportunity should be more than just an empty word.

No, you believe that opportunity should be replaced with certainty. In reality, the two are diametrically opposed. If you believe in opportunity, then you must also believe in the purposeful threat of failure. You must believe that those that fail should not be rewarded for failing because doing so inverts the risk/reward incentives and skews the economic calculus.

In short, this entire column is based on provable falsehoods and basic statistical illiteracy. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that a failing business model (print news) seems to be leading the charge against creative destruction and the cleansing efficiency of capitalism. In an unfettered market, the incompetent get left in the dust.