Income Inequality Made Easy

David Atkins, "thereisnospoon" at Hullabaloo:

One of the problems with talking about income inequality to folks who aren't politically obsessed is the tendency to become didactic and preachy, angrily showing off a lot of charts and graphs. I'm just as guilty of this as anyone else, if not more so. It's exactly the sort of stylistic approach that helped cost Al Gore the election in 2000.

Well, David Wong (pseudonym of Jason Pargin) has a great article to show the politically uninvolved why winger arguments about income inequality are wrong, in an easily accessible way. It's called Six Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying. Some highlights:

Most high-income earners do put in a ton of hours. Bill Gates seemed to never sleep (an employee once said that putting in 81 hours in four days still couldn't keep up with Gates' schedule). So yes, it's unfair that we tend to think that "being rich" means "lounging by the pool while an albino tiger massages our feet with his tongue." So, "Hey, I work hard for what I have!" is perfectly true. It's also insulting.

It's insulting for the exact same reason "Hey, I love my country!" is insulting: It implies that the listener doesn't. Otherwise there'd be no reason to say it.

It implies a bizarre alternate reality where society rewards you purely based on how much effort you exert, rather than according to how well your specific talents fit in with the needs of the marketplace in the particular era and part of the world in which you were born. It implies that the great investment banker makes 10 times more than a great nurse only because the banker works 10 times as hard.

He doesn't.

And even stranger, it implies that money earned is a perfect indicator of a person's value to society -- if you're broke, it must mean you're a loser who contributes nothing to anyone's life. And that's downright bizarre when it comes from the same people who also go on and on about the importance of parenting and family values. Surely they've noticed that being a great stay-at-home parent makes you exactly zero dollars a year.

And volunteering to work at a shelter for battered women? Doesn't pay shit! Diving into a creek to save a toddler from drowning? It pays infinitely less than throwing a touchdown pass during the Super Bowl.

And those are just a few short excerpts. There are a few places it could be a little better or make some stronger cases, but overall it's one of the funniest, clearest and most accessible non-technical works out there on the arguments around income inequality. If you have non-political friends who have fallen for some of the one percent's talking points, I highly recommend sharing it with them.

Income inequality is un-American.