The Technical Term is Parasites

Just one of the parasitic rich does more harm to the economic and social fabric of the nation than every recipient of food stamps, unemployment compensation, welfare and public education put together.

They are a clear and present danger and must be denied access to financial tools of destruction.

Via Digby:

In a recent defense of the 1 percent, Harvard economist Greg Mankiw admitted it might be bad if the rich got richer by sucking cash from the economy without giving any value back. A new study suggests many of the rich -- especially bankers and CEOs -- are doing just that.

Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel, economists at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, argue in a study responding to Mankiw that most of the rise in income inequality over the past few decades is due to the soaring pay of CEOs and Wall Street bankers who are milking money from the markets rather than generating much in the way of economic production.

"A substantial part of the extraordinary rise of top 1 percent incomes is not a result of well-functioning markets allocating pay according to value generated, but instead resulted from shifting institutional arrangements leading to shifting of rents to those at the very top," Bivens and Mishel write.

The technical term for this is "rent-seeking." Mankiw, a former economic adviser to President George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, suggested in his recent paper, "Defending The One Percent" that there wasn't much of this going on, that the 1 percent are just richer than you, and getting even richer all the time, because they are better than you.

But he does admit that rent-seeking could be a problem:

If the top 1 percent is earning an extra $1 in some way that reduces the incomes of the middle class and the poor by $2, then many people will see that as a social problem worth addressing. For example, suppose the rising income share of the top 1 percent were largely attributable to successful rent-seeking. Imagine that the government were to favor its political allies by granting them monopoly power over certain products, favorable regulations, or restrictions on trade. Such a policy would likely lead to both inequality and inefficiency. Economists of all stripes would deplore it. I certainly would.

Unfortunately, this is pretty much what has happened in the past 30 years, as Bivens and Mishel show, with numbers.