“Losing Our Country”—Part III

(To Idiots Like This…)

My answer to Paul Krugman’s June 10th NY Times editorial has been grinding around in the back of my brain and on the computer keyboard for a couple days while visiting with family and traveling from city to city.

I’m now ready to do some final editing and spit this thing out for your consumption and enjoyment. You might want to wear goggles or safety glasses because the spit will be flying I’m afraid.

First things first—Paul Krugman is well known to love to embellish his scholarly editorial commentary with large numbers of important sounding figures and statistics, but, as his recently retired managing editor Daniel Okrent so eloquently said:

“Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults.”

Did you hear me? This statement was from Mr. Krugman’s own managing editor!

I’m not inclined to be quite so kind because I feel that Krugman’s “nuanced” use of facts and statistics does two critical things--it renders the facts useless and the statistics moot.

In this most recent piece “Losing Our Country,” Krugman’s thesis starts out weak—

“Baby boomers like me grew up in a relatively equal society. In the 1960’s America was a place in which very few people were extremely wealthy, many blue-collar workers earned wages that placed them comfortably in the middle class, and working families could expect steadily rising living standards and a reasonable degree of economic security”

—and quickly dies on the operating table, unable to be resuscitated by even an expert economist because his statement is wrong Wrong WRONG.

I’m sorry Paul old buddy, but I too grew up in the same America that your did in the 1960’s and 1970’s (he’s three years older than me) and I can assure you that America then (like America now) was not in fact equal in any shape, in any form, nor in any fashion imaginable.

Further, our Founding Fathers (George, Ben, Thomas, Jefferson, et al) never intended for our society to be equal. The OPPORTUNITY for ACHIEVEMENT was the only thing that was supposed to be EQUAL—you #@*&% MORON!

In the rural Alabama that I knew in the 1960’s, where George Wallace ruled as Governor, whites and blacks still had separate drinking fountians, separate schools, and Miss Ozark and Miss Bronze beauty pageants were held separately each year.

The wealthy citizens lived on Squirrel Drive and on Broad Street, were members of the country club, and the ex-military new arrivals like us built their modest split level and ranch houses on Dellwood lane and on Brookwood circle and politely declined the country club membership offers because we had little in common with “those people” socially and besides, we needed to save the money to pay for college. We also didn’t expect “those people” to pay for our groceries, send us on vacation, and pay our doctor bills—we could do that quite well ourselves—thank you very much.

Next Krugman breaks out the “W” word I hate so much—he laments the fate of…get ready…here it comes…

“The Working Families.”

He says:

“Working families have seen little if any progress over the past 30 years. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the median family doubled between 1947 and 1973. But it rose only 22 percent from 1973 to 2003, and much of that gain was the result of wives' entering the paid labor force or working longer hours, not rising wages.”

So Paul Krugman, bless his little over educated liberal heart, is worried about “Working Families.” As I wrote back in September in my blog posting “Tax Cuts For Working Families,” I still want to know what the heck IS a “Working Family" anyway?

Do you know?

Please tell me if you do because I must have missed that day of class in school.

Here is part of what I said previously:

“Let me ask the question, exactly what is a "working family?"

Does the term “working family” mean that both parents, all of the children, and the family pets each hold full time or part time jobs?

Does the term “working family” only apply if you make less than $50,000 per year in total income?

Does the term imply that people making over $100,000 don’t work for a living and/or don't have families ?”

Next he (P. Krugman) throws in a subtle caveat—“adjusted for inflation”—in his presentation. The standard he used for “adjusting for inflation” is not mentioned. It could be the Consumer Price Index or it could be the standard annual inflation rate which has been all over the map since 1947. In fact, inflation was at its worst during the presidency of Democrat Jimmy Carter from 1976 to1980 and is probably at least partially responsible for the low level of income gains that Krugman quotes in the 1973-2003 period.

Finally, Krugman breaks out one of my other favorite weasel-words—the word “median.” Do you know what the median (or mean) income is? Do you know what the difference is between the median income and the average income of a group of citizens?

Many if not most of Krugman’s readers probably don’t, and he is counting on this fact to help prop up is poorly supported discussion; else he is ignoring this situation as he develops his argument.

Let me give you a simple example illustrating the difference between average and mean. Here goes…

Say that last year the people on your street have these incomes:

Household A $35,000
Household B $40,000
Household C $55,000
Household D $75,000
Household E $90,000

In this example, the median household income would be $55,000, but the average household income would be $59,000, $4,000 higher.

Stay with me here please, I’m almost done with the math examples…

Now say that some people move in, some people move out, and the next year the people on your street have these incomes:

Household A $38,000
Household B $42,000
Household C $50,000
Household D $75,000
Household E $90,000

Krugman’s lovely, all important median income in this example would be $50,000, but the average income would still be $59,000. Also notice that while two households made more than in the first example, one also made less and two stayed the same, so the average income stayed the same while the median income fell.

If I were Paul Krugman, I could, using the standards he has used in writing the current article, honestly write a headline blaring “MEDIAN INCOMES FALL 9% ON YOUR STREET.”

Would that make you jump off of the sofa and run to the voting booth to institute some change? In my opinion, this exact kind of rhetoric motivates a whole bunch of uninformed people to vote with their wallet rather than with their brains.

Next Comrade Krugman drags out another favorite dead horse—“economic security”—and starts flogging it with a wet noodle:

“Meanwhile, economic security is a thing of the past: year-to-year fluctuations in the incomes of working families are far larger than they were a generation ago. All it takes is a bit of bad luck in employment or health to plunge a family that seems solidly middle-class into poverty.”

He doesn’t bother with supporting this argument with facts and figures, because there are none—economic security is a figment of the imagination of the politicians that want to deliver an ever increasing stream of government supplied benefits and wealth distribution to an ever growing segment of the population. “Don’t worry” they say, vote for us and WE will give you a secure income, and secure health benefits, and secure retirement benefits, all at the expense of those mean old wealthy people living across town.

Krugman then opens the curtain and reveals his, and the Democrats, proposed solution to the purported problems…TAX THE WEALTHY, “THEY ARE DOING BETTER THAN WORKING FAMILIES ARE, AND IT’S JUST NOT FAIR.”

“But the wealthy have done very well indeed. Since 1973 the average income of the top 1 percent of Americans has doubled, and the income of the top 0.1 percent has tripled.

Why is this happening? I'll have more to say on that another day, but for now let me just point out that middle-class America didn't emerge by accident. It was created by what has been called the Great Compression of incomes that took place during World War II, and sustained for a generation by social norms that favored equality, strong labor unions and progressive taxation.

Since the 1970's, all of those sustaining forces have lost their power.

Since 1980 in particular, U.S. government policies have consistently favored the wealthy at the expense of working families - and under the current administration, that favoritism has become extreme and relentless. From tax cuts that favor the rich to bankruptcy "reform" that punishes the unlucky, almost every domestic policy seems intended to accelerate our march back to the robber baron era.”

See, Krugman somehow thinks that it’s the Government's job, not the individual’s job to earn a living and take care of families. Krugman and his ilk’s idea of the means to raise the income of their beloved “working families” is to take the money away from those that EARNED it, in the form of progressive taxation, and give it to those that didn’t EARN IT in the form of rebates and tax credits.

In fact, Krugman comes right out and says it: “social norms that favored equality, strong labor unions, and progressive taxation.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Paul Krugman is a lying moron, and he believes that YOU can’t take care of your own business, and if you happen to be an achiever that has “won life’s lottery” and earns a good living, he wants the government to bring a gun to your door and take some of your money and spend it as he and his fellow liberal friends see fit.

What total, unmitigated, bigotry—financial bigotry. How much longer are WE going to put up with this way of thinking?

I'll give Paul Krugman one final concession...You're right Paul...we are losing our country...

We're losing our country to Idiots Like you.

Costa Rica here I come...