The Republican Clown Car

Amazing delusions!

Krugman writes: "Rising inequality has obvious economic costs: stagnant wages despite rising productivity, rising debt that makes us more vulnerable to financial crisis. It also has big social and human costs."

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. (photo: AP)

Paranoia of the Plutocrats

By Paul Krugman, The New York Times

28 January 14

ising inequality has obvious economic costs: stagnant wages despite rising productivity, rising debt that makes us more vulnerable to financial crisis. It also has big social and human costs. There is, for example, strong evidence that high inequality leads to worse health and higher mortality.

But there's more. Extreme inequality, it turns out, creates a class of people who are alarmingly detached from reality - and simultaneously gives these people great power.

 

The example many are buzzing about right now is the billionaire investor Tom Perkins, a founding member of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Perkins lamented public criticism of the "one percent" - and compared such criticism to Nazi attacks on the Jews, suggesting that we are on the road to another Kristallnacht.

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