Still Greedy Motherfuckers at Davos

Yes, the world's obscenely wealthy were all a-flutter about restiveness among the peasants, and eager to figure out how to make it stop. Until somebody mentioned higher taxes.

No surprise: they only started caring about income inequality when it started hitting them in the wallet, and they're willing to do anything to fix it - anything that doesn't cost them a dime, that is.

Andy Robinson at The Nation:

But ever since the onset of economic crisis, the astute Davos-goer’s agenda must also include at least one session on the implications of soaring income polarization in the twenty-first century. CEOs and private-equity fund managers—even some of the seventy Forbes billionaires attending—interrupted their search for distressed assets in the eurozone this year to attend lectures by grim-faced New York University economist and Davos regular Nouriel Roubini or Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz.

The message: inequality is no longer just a social or ethical issue but an economic blight that will stymie recovery. “The superrich spend little of their incremental income, so we have a problem of aggregate demand, and that hurts the economy,” Roubini explained at a debate evocatively titled “The Seeds of Dystopia.” More than half the 1,200 investors, analysts and traders consulted in a Bloomberg poll published on the eve of the summit agreed that inequality damages economic growth. “Marx was right; capitalism creates obstacles to its own advancement,” said Roubini. The audience nodded in agreement and then headed off for sessions on new investment opportunities in “frontier markets” like Mongolia and Azerbaijan.

But many attendees lost their cool over Barack Obama’s State of the Union promise to introduce a minimum 30 percent income tax on millionaires. American CEOs who had followed the speech on their iPads during the three-hour drive from the airport vented their spleen during a session on the world business outlook. “They say they want to create employment, then they attack the employment creators,” complained Duncan Niederauer, CEO of the electronic stock exchange Euronext, who took home $5 million last year. “It’s wealth creation that matters, not income distribution,” chimed in Alcoa CEO Klaus Kleinfeld, whose last compensation package topped $11 million. Only John Chambers of Cisco (who took home $38 million last year) seemed to sense that the old Davos clichés of trickle-down might not work anymore. He chided Kleinfeld’s arrogance, saying, “It’s an embarrassment that US business has not found a way to combine its success with a growing middle class.”

Actually, US business did find a way "to combine its success with a growing middle class." It worked just 50 years ago and all it took was heavy regulation, strong unions and 90 percent top marginal tax rates.

American business bought off Congress to eliminate all three legs of that stool of economic success, and now they're bitching because it won't stand up without them.