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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; inequality</title>
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		<title>Janet Yellen Shills for the Democrats</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/janet-yellen-shills-for-the-democrats/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=janet-yellen-shills-for-the-democrats</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Oct 2014 04:42:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[campaign slogans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[inequality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[myth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War on Women]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243311</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Chairman of the Federal Reserve indulges a destructive leftist lie. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/janet-yellen.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243314" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/janet-yellen-450x337.jpg" alt="janet-yellen" width="278" height="208" /></a>At a conference last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen recycled a shopworn Democrat talking point about the supposed crisis of income inequality and stalled economic mobility. “The extent and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concerns me,” Yellen said, going on to wonder “whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history,” especially “equality of opportunity.”</p>
<p>Like the mythic “war on women,” this progressive sound bite is misleading and duplicitous, based on statistical sleight of hand. Worse yet, it is a pretext for more and more government expansion and intrusion into the economy, and for more and more redistribution of income through entitlement programs. It makes one wonder what one of the most powerful government officials impacting the economy, supposedly a politically neutral technocrat, is doing recycling Democratic campaign slogans.</p>
<p>The “income inequality” claim depends on ignoring numerous data that contradict it. For one thing, it glosses over the mobility among the 5 income cohorts over time, assuming that the same people are rich or poor year after year. But as Stephen Moore and James Pierson <a href="http://spectator.org/articles/58135/dont-eat-rich">point out</a>, “In America they [the rich] don’t generally stay rich for long. A few years ago the Department of Treasury examined what happens to the wealth of families across several generations. Guess what: the poor got richer and the rich got poorer. The incomes of poor households rose 80 percent from 1987 to 1996 and then more than doubled from 1996 to 2005. The richer people were at the start of this period, the more income losses they suffered in subsequent years.”</p>
<p>The Treasury study indeed confirms this mobility, finding that between 1996 and 2005 over half of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile. Half of taxpayers in the bottom quintile in 1996 moved to a higher income group in 2005. Meanwhile, only 25% of the richest 1/100 of 1% in 1996 were still that rich in 2005. This mobility has indeed stalled, but not for “several decades,” as Yellen claimed, and not because of the sinister machinations of the wealthy. Its cause rather is the sluggish economic growth after the recession ended 5 years ago, and the blame for that in large part falls on Obama and the Democrats’ regulatory overreach, trillion-dollar deficits, “you didn’t build that” anti-business rhetoric, and redistributionist economic policies. Get the feds out of the way of the economy so it can grow, and we will see income growth and mobility again.</p>
<p>The “income inequality” meme ignores other facts as well. It focuses only on “money income,” neglecting the value of government transfers like Medicaid, Electronic Benefit Transfer cards (formerly known as food stamps and welfare checks), emergency-room health care, Section 8 housing subsidies, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, all of which boost the buying power of the statistical poor and lower middle class. For the middle class, “money income” ignores the value of employer-provided fringe benefits such as health care. As for the rich, “money income” ignores the highly progressive taxes they pay to fund those government programs. As Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2014/05/20-rising-inequality-1920s-measuring-income-burtless">writes</a>, “To disregard the impact of transfers and progressive taxation on the distribution of income and family well-being is to ignore America’s most expensive efforts to lessen the gap between the nation’s rich, middle class, and poor.”</p>
<p>Finally, consumption––how much people spend–– is more revealing than “money income” as a measurement of economic wellbeing. In fact, consumption rates of the lowest income quintile have increased over the years, reaching nearly twice of income in 2005. As a result, Kip Hagopian and Lee Ohanian <a href="http://www.hoover.org/research/mismeasure-inequality">write</a>, “A family claiming $22,300 in income in 2005 would have reported about $44,000 in expenditures in that year. As noted earlier, the gap between reported income and consumption is filled by various categories of government transfer payments (including Medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, etc.), family savings, imputed income from owner-occupied housing, barter, support from family and friends, and income from the underground economy.” Indeed, if one takes into account consumption, the statistical <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/what-is-poverty">poor enjoy living standards higher</a> than the average European. The obsession on “money income” ignores how well all Americans live.</p>
<p>Yellen’s second claim, that income inequality contradicts “values rooted in our nation’s history” like “equality of opportunity,” is equally muddled. If we look at the political order of the Constitution––our most important “national values”–– income inequality was taken for granted, a reflection of an unchanging and flawed human nature. In his famous comments on “factions” in <em>Federalist</em> 10, James Madison wrote, “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. <em>The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests.</em> <em>The protection of these faculties is the first object of government</em> [emphasis added]. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.” Hence “the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.” Income inequality is a fact of life, not a failure of government or the economy.</p>
<p>Indeed, the clashing interests of those with property and those without, and the political discord they create, were continually on the minds of the delegates to the Constitutional convention. New Yorker Gouverneur Morris, arguing for an appointed rather than a popularly elected Senate, frankly said, “The Rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did. They always will. The proper security against them is to form them into a separate interest. The two forces will then control each other . . . By thus combining and setting apart, the aristocratic interest, the popular interest will be combined against it. There will be a mutual check and mutual security.”</p>
<p>Thus the “mixed government” of the Constitution was designed <em>not</em> to eliminate property inequality, which is rooted in the differences of talent, hard work, virtue, and luck among people. Rather, it was created to prevent <em>any </em>faction, whether the rich or the poor, from taking control of the government in order to aggrandize its own power and serve its own interests at the expense of others’. Only that way can the freedom, property, and opportunity of all be kept safe.</p>
<p>Our “national values,” then, are for equality of opportunity, not equality of result. Yellen pays lip service to the former, yet that sentiment contradicts the whole complaint about income inequality, which is about result, not opportunity. Like most progressives, Yellen is really concerned with equality of result, something the Founders abhorred, for a tyrannical government always promises the masses equality of result, in the form of a redistribution of property, in order to secure the support of the people for centralizing and increasing government power and limiting personal freedom. But equality of result, as the sorry and bloody history of communism shows, is contrary to the reality of human nature and the unequal distribution of talent and character. As Plato wrote, it is “numerical” equality rather than “proportionate equality,” which takes into account the differences of character and virtue that exist among people, and “assigns in proportion what is fitting to each. Indeed, it is precisely this which constitutes for us political justice.”</p>
<p>America’s “national values” have traditionally included equality of opportunity, not equality of result. People should be free to rise to whatever levels their differing talents and virtues can take them. Differences of wealth over time and over large populations reflect those differences more than any unjust manipulation of the economy by the rich. Moreover, in a dynamic, free-market economy, the success of the well off improves the well being of the rest, whether by creating jobs or paying the trillions of dollars in taxes that fund the redistributive programs that have allowed millions of American to enjoy a material existence only dreamed of by most of the human race.</p>
<p>We still have equality of opportunity, whether measured by the millions of ordinary people who create and run businesses big and small, or the 11 million illegal aliens who didn’t risk their lives coming to America because it lacks economic opportunity. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve has no business indulging a progressive canard that exploits envy and resentment for electoral gain.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Jesus, Today’s Church, and ‘Inequality’</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/jesus-todays-church-and-inequality/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jesus-todays-church-and-inequality</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/jesus-todays-church-and-inequality/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Jul 2014 04:20:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bible]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[inequality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jesus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237204</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What Jesus really said (and didn’t say) about the poor, the rich, and inequality.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/pl.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-237236" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/pl.jpg" alt="pl" width="245" height="300" /></a>That Jesus commanded His disciples—of which I am one—to love “the poor” is beyond dispute. Equally beyond dispute, however, is that, regardless of what growing legions of left-leaning clerics would have us believe, Jesus <em>never—</em>never <em>ever—</em>addressed the issue of “inequality.”</p>
<p>The head of my church and the most visible religious leader on the world stage today, Pope Francis, is as guilty a culprit as is anyone on this score. The Pope made headlines on more than a few occasions since his tenure began when His Holiness condemned “inequality” generally, and the traditional American economic system in particular, with a bluntness that would have made Barack Hussein Obama blush.</p>
<p>Ours is “an economy of exclusion and inequality,” Pope Francis insisted. Our system of “inequality” both results from and encourages “laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless.” Thus, “masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”</p>
<p>Worse, the Pope informs us, our “capitalist” system with its “inequality” violates the divine injunction against “killing,” for “such an economy <em>kills</em>” (emphasis added).</p>
<p>Pope Francis may be the most well known Christian leader to conflate Jesus’ teachings on the proper treatment of <em>the poor </em>with the issue of income and wealth “inequalities.” But he speaks for countless lesser known representatives of Christianity.</p>
<p>Take Norma Cook Everist, a professor of church and ministry. In an article that she penned for <em>The Lutheran, </em>Everist insists that things haven’t changed a lick since Martin Luther said that “the poor” are routinely “defrauded” by “the rich.”</p>
<p>“Inequality,” Everist remarks, divides the world into “makers” and “takers” while fostering the godless fiction that some people, and even “some children,” are “worth more” than others, and that some, “the poor,” are of “‘of no worth’[.]”</p>
<p>The project of reducing the Gospel to an activist’s manual on addressing “inequality” is fraught with difficulties.</p>
<p>First, as already noted, it is simply <em>dishonest: </em>there is no basis, Biblical or otherwise, for equating an obligation to care for the poor with an obligation to endorse political policies ostensibly aimed at reducing “inequalities” in income and wealth. Decent minded people of all faiths and no faith have long recognized the need to care for those in poverty, and Christians specifically have always been acutely aware of this as a moral imperative.</p>
<p>But it hasn’t been until the emergence of large, centralized governments, immensely affluent, industrialized societies, and the dominance of secular, egalitarian ideologies—i.e. phenomena that don’t appear until relatively late in Christian history—that anyone, much less any Christian cleric, has thought to identify compassion for the poor with the amelioration of “inequalities.”</p>
<p>Second, even the tireless emphasis that pastors place upon Jesus’ relationship with “the poor” is less than fully honest, for it is grounded in a selective reading of the New Testament.</p>
<p>“The poor” is as ambiguous as it is emotionally-charged a term. Most of the people among whom Jesus spent His time were certainly not rich by the standards of their day, and some of them did indeed live in grinding poverty. While it’s true that there was no “middle class,” it’s equally true that just because the tax collectors, farmers, fishermen, carpenters and so forth with whom He appears to have fraternized were not rich, neither were they all impoverished.</p>
<p>That today’s clerics fail to make these discriminations between those to whom Jesus ministered by referring to them all as “the poor” reflects their awareness of the emotional <em>and </em>moral appeal of this moniker. After all, “the poor” are, well, poor: only the heartless could fail to feel for them. And “the poor” also lends those so designated moral authority, for being the <em>victims</em> of their circumstances, “the poor” are always <em>blameless</em>.</p>
<p>Third, this <em>exclusive stress</em> on Jesus’ fondness for “the poor,” whether by accident or design, conveys the impression that He was <em>exclusively fond</em> of “the poor,” a respecter of persons by virtue of their socio-economic condition—exactly what the Bible insists God <em>is not. </em></p>
<p>This notion, in turn, further underscores a sense of moral superiority among “the poor” by fueling it with the fiction that their poverty is a saving grace. “The poor,” in other words, can too easily think that it is <em>they, </em>not “<em>the rich,” </em>that count for more in God’s eyes.</p>
<p>Some observers, like the 19<sup>th</sup> century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, thought that this, in fact, was the whole purpose behind Christianity. In referring to it as a “slave morality,” Nietzsche’s point is that it serves, and was always meant to serve, the psychological and emotional interests of the poor masses, namely their interest in exacting a sort of imaginary vengeance against the wealthy by demonizing them while insisting upon their own “blessedness.”</p>
<p>Admittedly, Nietzsche was an enemy of Christianity. But he <em>became </em>an enemy <em>after </em>having been raised Christian by his Lutheran minister father. In any event, one needn’t accept Nietzsche’s reading of Christianity—I do not—in order to see that those Christian leaders who use their pulpits to blast “inequality” lend it considerable plausibility.</p>
<p>Finally, Jesus excoriated “the rich,” yes; but He was no less hard on “the poor,” including and particularly His closest followers. Conversely, sometimes Jesus lavished praise upon “the rich.”</p>
<p>For 2,000 years, whether rightly or wrongly, Christendom’s worst villain has been, not the rich and famous Herod, Pilate, or Nero, but Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus’ closest disciples and a “poor” man who relinquished what possessions he may have had in order to follow Him. Moreover, Jesus regularly castigated his “poor” disciples for their lack of faith, and, sometimes, compared them unfavorably with wealthy Gentiles, like the Roman Centurion whose <em>servant </em>Jesus healed.</p>
<p>Moreover, it is worth noting that besides Himself, the greatest example of Christian charity that Jesus extolled is that of the Good Samaritan, a <em>rich </em>man who deployed some of his ample resources to help a stranger in need.</p>
<p>We also shouldn’t forget that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea were rich members of the priestly class with whom Jesus must’ve been particularly close, for not only did they attempt to prevail upon their fellow Pharisees to refrain from turning Jesus over to the Romans. Following Jesus’ crucifixion, both prepared His body for burial in the tomb that Joseph secured for Him.</p>
<p>All of this can be found easily enough in the four canonical Gospels which are read in Christian churches throughout the world every Sunday. That these points are neglected by so many ministers is due, I submit, to their obsession with combating, not poverty, but “inequalities” in income and wealth—a topic, this Christian has been at pains to show, having nothing to do with either the whole of the Bible or The New Testament.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Robert Reich&#8217;s Revolutionary Rants</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/robert-reichs-revolutionary-rants/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=robert-reichs-revolutionary-rants</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 12 Feb 2014 05:50:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[inequality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minimum wage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[MoveOn video]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Robert Reich]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218564</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Leftist economist "connects the dots" and uncovers a free market conspiracy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/rr_edited-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218569" alt="rr_edited-1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/rr_edited-1.jpg" width="420" height="196" /></a>To distract from Barack Obama&#8217;s failing presidency and the misery it is causing millions of Americans, leftist gadfly Robert Reich is wheeling out tired old paranoid rhetoric about class warfare and &#8220;inequality.&#8221;</p>
<p>Using language out of the <i>Communist Manifesto</i>, Reich inveighs against an invisible, cartoonish, Monopoly Man-type villain. Of course, Reich has no interest in talking about the vicious war that President Obama and his allies are waging against productive members of society, those who have affordable health insurance, and those who pay the taxes used up by the nonproductive.</p>
<p>Long a thuggish shill of the now-dying labor movement, Reich rants that</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Opposing a minimum wage hike, blocking unemployment insurance, cutting food stamps, keeping millions from accessing Medicaid &#8230; I believe these positions are part of a concerted effort to keep struggling folks down that represents nothing less than a war on the poor and working class.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Although poll after poll has shown that &#8220;inequality&#8221; doesn&#8217;t register on American voters&#8217; radar screens, Reich and the Left are pushing hard to raise the federal minimum wage, a move that will hit the young, especially young people of color, the hardest. Under 3 percent of all workers in the nation (and an even lower percentage of full-time workers) earn the minimum wage.</p>
<p>Hiking the minimum wage has never been about helping low-income people. In fact it has racist origins and was originally used <a href="http://amarillo.com/opinion/opinion-columnist/weekly-opinion-columnist/2013-03-05/williams-minimum-wage-has-racist">to hurt minorities</a>. It doesn&#8217;t help fast food workers. Increasing the minimum wage would benefit wealthier, white teens at the expense of minority teens, <a href="http://freebeacon.com/study-minimum-wage-hike-would-do-little-to-alleviate-poverty/">according</a> to American Action Forum:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Instead of combating income inequality, an increase in the minimum wage may actually enlarge the income gap by limiting earnings from those who need them most (the jobless) and directing them to those who need it least, the top 20% of earners.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Those living below the poverty line are more likely to be unemployed, as opposed to earning a minimum wage, so they probably wouldn&#8217;t benefit from hiking the wage rate, Doug Holtz-Eakin, head of American Action Forum and a former Congressional Budget Office director.</p>
<p>“Minimum wage jobs are meant to be stepping stones, in which workers find internal promotions,” Holtz-Eakin said. “The key to not being poor is work. You have to have a robustly growing economy with job opportunities and we haven’t had that over the past five years.”</p>
<p>“If you raise the minimum wage and stop someone from getting hired, you’re transferring wages from the unemployed to someone already working,” he said.</p>
<p>In Europe unsustainable employee costs are forcing restaurants to replace fast food order-takers with machines, and plans are in place for automated food preparation. It will happen here too, especially in places like SeaTac, Wash., where voters recently approved a job-killing $15-an-hour minimum wage.</p>
<p>The minimum wage eliminates jobs from the workforce, forcing people onto welfare, and helps unions by restricting competition among those offering their labor. People who are dependent on the government tend to support Democrats.</p>
<p>Raising the hourly minimum wage, whether to $9, $10.10 as President Obama proposes, or $15, isn&#8217;t really about helping people.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s about recruiting voters and creating dependent Americans who will help to perpetuate the power of the Democratic Party.</p>
<p>Like mom, apple pie, and puppies, increasing the minimum wage often scores well in opinion polls. Left-wing activist groups support raising the minimum wage because it helps them to mobilize voters and their own troops.</p>
<p>ACORN used to put minimum wage propositions on the ballot in order to drive up turn out among poor voters. &#8220;We would like it to become a fact of political life where every year the other side has to contend with a minimum wage law in some state,&#8221; said Jen Kern, director of ACORN&#8217;s Living Wage Resource Center.</p>
<p>&#8220;This is what moves people to the polls now. This is our gay marriage,&#8221; she said a few years ago in a reference to the now-abandoned conservative tactic of putting anti-same sex referendums on the ballot in order to drive up conservative voter turnout.</p>
<p>But facts matter little to <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2023">Reich</a>, a radical true believer and undistinguished left-wing economist with the gift of gab who served as President Clinton&#8217;s labor secretary. Reich is repackaging the arguments that &#8220;social justice&#8221; crusaders have long used to prey on the naive and ignorant.</p>
<p>Reich is doing this in part to promote his new movie, <i>Inequality for All</i>. Reich <a href="http://billmoyers.com/segment/robert-reich%E2%80%99s-plan-for-fixing-america%E2%80%99s-economy/">says</a> his piece of radical agitprop is aimed at ensuring there is “upward mobility again, in our society and in our economy.” Getting Americans politically involved will help “change the rules” that he falsely claims contributed to the recession that began under George W. Bush and has since intensified under Barack Obama.</p>
<p>In a new <a href="http://front.moveon.org/war_on_the_poor_reich/#.UvlA9n-9KSM">MoveOn video</a>, Reich accuses mysterious, unnamed forces &#8212; he calls them &#8220;they&#8221; &#8212; of plotting against low-income people. This rhetorical use of the pronoun <i>they</i> ought to be referred to as the Paranoid Third Person. It&#8217;s a staple of conspiracy theorists, community organizers, and Saul Alinsky devotees and it&#8217;s part of the same whiny refrain we&#8217;ve been hearing from Reich and his Sixties leftover friends like <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1183">Roger Hickey</a> for decades now.</p>
<p>It ties in well with the current work of MoveOn, the leftist group that was created to get the neo-Marxists of the modern Democratic Party back on-message by distracting from Bill Clinton&#8217;s Oval Office sexual affair with a young intern. True to form, MoveOn is now bringing up marginal or irrelevant economic issues to bail out Barack Obama.</p>
<p>Invisible forces are conspiring against poor and working-class Americans, according to Reich. &#8220;What are they really after?&#8221;</p>
<p>In his musings, Reich urges viewers to &#8220;connect these seven dots.&#8221; Cue the violins:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;They&#8217;re against extending unemployment benefits to people who have been out of work for more than six months even though there&#8217;s still only one job for every three unemployed.</p>
<p>They don&#8217;t want to raise the minimum wage even though today&#8217;s federal minimum is 25 percent below what it was in 1968, adjusted for inflation.</p>
<p>They&#8217;re against extending Medicaid benefits to millions of low-wage workers</p>
<p>They want to cut food stamps.</p>
<p>They refuse to invest in education or job training.</p>
<p>They don&#8217;t want to rebuild America&#8217;s crumbling infrastructure or have any other jobs programs.</p>
<p>They&#8217;re out to bust unions.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Like any good snake oil salesman, he offers up a simplistic solution:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Do you see a pattern here? They&#8217;re waging a war against the poor and the working class in order to keep people down because when you&#8217;re unemployed, without any support, without any bargaining power and you have to feed your family, you&#8217;re desperate, and when you&#8217;re desperate you&#8217;ll take whatever they are willing to pay you even if it&#8217;s next to nothing. And you won&#8217;t dare make a fuss. You won&#8217;t complain about unsafe work conditions or toxic chemicals leaking out of storage tanks or anything else. You won&#8217;t run the risk of trying to form a union. You won&#8217;t get involved in politics. You won&#8217;t make a ruckus or rock the boat in any way. You&#8217;ll take whatever they choose to give you because you are sinking. Make no mistake this war against the poor and working class is designed to make sure Americans who&#8217;ve been losing ground for 30 years don&#8217;t dare do anything about it. Without extended unemployment benefits, a declining real minimum wage, no Medicaid, no food stamps, no education, job training, or jobs program, and no union, you&#8217;ll do exactly as they tell you and that&#8217;s fine with them but it&#8217;s bad for America.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>This litany of nonsense and overblown rhetoric is what we&#8217;ve come to expect from Reich and his ilk.</p>
<p>This is Chicken Little, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/kathy-shaidle/they%E2%80%99re-called-boobs-the-toxic-lies-of-erin-brockovich/">Erin Brockovich</a>-style horror propaganda that has no relationship to life in the real world. In our severely over-regulated society Americans aren&#8217;t at peril from unsafe work conditions or toxic chemicals. Americans aren&#8217;t dropping dead because of &#8220;crumbling&#8221; highways. They aren&#8217;t clamoring to join unions, which they correctly view as obstacles to progress and self-advancement. No one is trying to abolish the social safety net, get rid of food stamps, Medicaid, or government-subsidized education and job training.</p>
<p>But telling the truth isn&#8217;t good for recruiting.</p>
<p>Reich needs to sell an apocalyptic fantasy in order to hoodwink Americans into joining his cause. In fact Reich and his friends in the Obama administration are the ones waging war against the poor and workers, creating more poor people, more unemployed people, more underemployed people, and driving people out of the labor force altogether. With the national debt closing in on $17.3 trillion and the trillions of dollars wasted over the years on the War on Poverty, Americans have little to show after decades of following the policy prescriptions of the Left.</p>
<p>Reich&#8217;s noise-making is about the politics of distraction, misdirecting public attention, trying to change the national political conversation, moving it away from the stagnant economy, the failing Obamacare program, the political scandals that are becoming too numerous to count, and the other grave problems in American society that left-wingers have caused and exacerbated.</p>
<p>Given the mainstream media&#8217;s continuing love affair with the telegenic Reich, he&#8217;s likely to be in the spotlight, deceiving the American public, for a long time to come.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>The Inequality Boogeyman</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/the-inequality-boogeyman/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-inequality-boogeyman</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/the-inequality-boogeyman/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 29 Jan 2014 05:15:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[inequality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OIL]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rich]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rockefeller]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wealth]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217498</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The real cause of wealth differentials in society. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/income-inequality-99-prtest-occupy-wall-street1.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217519" alt="income-inequality-99-prtest-occupy-wall-street1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/income-inequality-99-prtest-occupy-wall-street1.gif" width="263" height="178" /></a>During a recent lunch in a restaurant, someone complimented my wife on the perfume she was wearing. But I was wholly unaware that she was wearing perfume, even though we had been in a car together for about half an hour, driving to the restaurant.</p>
<p>My sense of smell is very poor. But there is one thing I can smell far better than most people — gas escaping. During my years of living on the Stanford University campus, and walking back and forth to work at my office, I more than once passed a faculty house and smelled gas escaping. When there was nobody home, I would leave a note, warning them.</p>
<p>When walking past the same house again a few days later, I could see where the utility company had been digging in the yard — and, after that, there was no more smell of gas escaping. But apparently the people who lived in these homes had not smelled anything.</p>
<p>These little episodes have much wider implications. Most of us are much better at some things than at others, and what we are good at can vary enormously from one person to another. Despite the preoccupation — if not obsession — of intellectuals with equality, we are all very unequal in what we do well and what we do badly.</p>
<p>It may not be innate, like a sense of smell, but differences in capabilities are inescapable, and they make a big difference in what and how much we can contribute to each other&#8217;s economic and other well-being. If we all had the same capabilities and the same limitations, one individual&#8217;s limitations would be the same as the limitations of the entire human species.</p>
<p>We are lucky that we are so different, so that the capabilities of many other people can cover our limitations.</p>
<p>One of the problems with so many discussions of income and wealth is that the intelligentsia are so obsessed with the money that people receive that they give little or no attention to what causes money to be paid to them, in the first place.</p>
<p>The money itself is not wealth. Otherwise the government could make us all rich just by printing more of it. From the standpoint of a society as a whole, money is just an artificial device to give us incentives to produce real things — goods and services.</p>
<p>Those goods and services are the real &#8220;wealth of nations,&#8221; as Adam Smith titled his treatise on economics in the 18th century.</p>
<p>Yet when the intelligentsia discuss such things as the historic fortunes of people like John D.Rockefeller, they usually pay little — if any — attention to what it was that caused so many millions of people to voluntarily turn their individually modest sums of money over to Rockefeller, adding up to his vast fortune.</p>
<p>What Rockefeller did first to earn their money was find ways to bring down the cost of producing and distributing kerosene to a fraction of what it had been before his innovations. This profoundly changed the lives of millions of working people.</p>
<p>Before Rockefeller came along in the 19th century, the ancient saying, &#8220;The night cometh when no man can work&#8221; still applied. There were not yet electric lights, and burning kerosene for hours every night was not something that ordinary working people could afford. For many millions of people, there was little to do after dark, except go to bed.</p>
<p>Too many discussions of large fortunes attribute them to &#8220;greed&#8221; — as if wanting a lot of money is enough to cause other people to hand it over to you. It is a childish idea, when you stop and think about it — but who stops and thinks these days?</p>
<p>The transfer of money was a zero-sum process. What increased the wealth of society was Rockefeller&#8217;s cheap kerosene that added hundreds of hours of light to people&#8217;s lives annually.</p>
<p>Edison, Ford, the Wright brothers, and innumerable others also created unprecedented expansions of the lives of ordinary people. The individual fortunes represented a fraction of the wealth created.</p>
<p>Even those of us who create goods and services in more mundane ways receive income that may be very important to us, but it is what we create for others, with our widely varying capabilities, that is the real wealth of nations.</p>
<p>Intellectuals&#8217; obsession with income statistics — calling envy &#8220;social justice&#8221; — ignores vast differences in productivity that are far more fundamental to everyone&#8217;s well-being. Killing the goose that lays the golden egg has ruined many economies.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obamacare&#8217;s Stunning Redistribution of Wealth</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/john-perazzo/obamacares-stunning-redistribution-of-wealth/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacares-stunning-redistribution-of-wealth</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/john-perazzo/obamacares-stunning-redistribution-of-wealth/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Jan 2014 05:20:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Perazzo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[inequality]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214644</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A closer look at precisely how much Obamacare takes from you, to give to others.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/obama-health-care.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214646" alt="obama-health-care" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/obama-health-care.jpg" width="280" height="158" /></a>For all the attention Obamacare has drawn in recent weeks, few observers have noted that the law is having the unexpected, yet most welcome, effect of transforming scores of millions of Americans, virtually overnight, into generous benefactors of the less fortunate. A real-world example—representative of countless millions of similar situations—will make this crystal clear:</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s say that you are a healthy, hardworking 54-year-old single adult in San Francisco earning $45,960 per year—the income level at which federal Obamacare subsidies from your fellow taxpayers are no longer available to help you pay your monthly health-insurance premiums. As a San Francisco resident, you are permitted to choose from among 16 separate Obamacare-compliant insurance plans. Four of these are so-called “Bronze” plans, low-level policies whose average premium will cost you $453 per month, or $5,436 per year. In exchange for those premium payments, a Bronze plan will cover 60% of your medical expenses—that is, <i>after</i> you meet the $5,000 out-of-pocket annual deductible. For this priceless peace of mind, you can thank Obamacare—the Democratic Party&#8217;s gift to a grateful America.</p>
<p>Let us contrast your case with that of Joe, another 54-year-old single individual in San Francisco, who happens to be an <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/11/25/obamacare-policies-slam-smokers-could-backfire/">obese alcoholic and longtime drug abuser</a> with little ambition and no history of ever having held a full-time job for very long. Joe currently earns $15,860 per year, which is just above the income level that would have made him eligible for Medicaid. Because Joe doesn&#8217;t qualify for Medicaid, Obamacare stipulates that he must now purchase his own health insurance—thereby proving that, contrary to the shrill rhetoric of conservative naysayers, no one gets an undeserved free ride under Obamacare.</p>
<p>Like you, Joe can choose from among 16 separate plans that are available to San Francisco residents. But unlike you, he is eligible to receive federal government subsidies—money that other, wealthier Americans, such as you, magnanimously “contribute” toward the healthcare expenses of financially “disadvantaged” individuals. If he selects one of the four Bronze plans (whose average monthly premium is $453), Joe qualifies for $452 in average monthly subsidies—meaning that, regardless of which Bronze plan he chooses, he will pay a monthly premium of exactly $1. You read that correctly. The very same healthcare plan that would cost you $453 per month, is available to Joe for $1 per month—i.e., the cost of three oatmeal-raisin cookies at your local Subway sandwich shop. Over the course of a year, you will pay a total of $5,436 in policy premiums, while Joe, who sadly failed to qualify for <i>free</i> healthcare through Medicaid, will pay his own fair share of $12. This is all in the interest of social justice, you understand. And please, <i>don&#8217;t even think</i> about whispering that Obamacare might be some sort of “wealth redistribution” scheme, lest you expose yourself as a petulant reactionary who doesn&#8217;t give a damn about sick people.</p>
<p>Oh, imagine what a wonderful world it would be if we could somehow transfer this same brand of Obamacare-style fairness to realms other than health insurance. In such a utopia, for example, the $25,000 new automobile that you purchase would cost a deserving soul like Joe just $55. Your $100 nightly fee at a motel would be 45 cents for Joe. And the $25 hardcover book you purchase at Barnes &amp; Noble would set Joe back about a nickel. What&#8217;s that, you say? These items aren&#8217;t life-and-death necessities, like medical care, and thus don&#8217;t serve as useful analogies? Good point! Let&#8217;s stick with real necessities, such as food and housing: The same load of groceries that costs you $250 would cost Joe 55 cents. Your $1,200-per-month rent or mortgage payment would be available to Joe for about $2.65 a month. And the $250,000 home you seek to buy could be Joe&#8217;s for about $552. Yes, we&#8217;re talking about a veritable paradise of fairness!</p>
<p>But let&#8217;s return, for a moment, to the subject of healthcare in the here-and-now. Suppose you decide to opt for something substantially better than the aforementioned Bronze plan. As a resident of San Francisco, you can also choose from among four separate Silver plans, which each pay 70% of your medical costs (after a $2,000 annual deductible) and have an average monthly premium of $614. For Joe, these same four plans are available for an average of $38 per month—thanks to the marvelous, magical subsidies that are built into Obamacare. In fact, <i>one</i> of the Silver plans in particular would cost Joe just twenty nickels per month—a darned fair deal for someone needing healthcare, wouldn&#8217;t you say? And again, try not to view the disparity between <i>your</i> fee and <i>Joe&#8217;s</i> fee as some form of “wealth redistribution,” but rather as an opportunity for you to cultivate the fiscal virtue that our president terms “<a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-s-tax-plan-based-neighborliness">neighborliness</a>,” whereby those who are “<a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-s-tax-plan-based-neighborliness">sitting pretty</a>”—like you—extend a helping hand to the “<a href="http://seattlemedium.com/president-obama-help-our-less-fortunate-at-christmas/">less fortunate</a>”—like Joe. Yes indeed, think about how deliriously happy you&#8217;re making good-ol&#8217; Joe!</p>
<p>Now, if you&#8217;re feeling somewhat bold and are inclined to seek out even better coverage, you might opt to enroll in one of San Francisco&#8217;s four Gold insurance plans, which pay 80% of your medical costs (with no deductibles) and have an average monthly premium of $752. For Joe, the average cost of such a policy is $166 per month.</p>
<p>And then there are the top-of-the-line policies—the four Platinum plans—which will pay 90% of your medical expenses and will cost you, on average, $843 in monthly premiums. For Joe, by contrast, the cost of these plans will run about $258 a month.</p>
<p>So, let&#8217;s review: Joe can have <i>the very best</i> coverage available—the type of Platinum plan that our revered overlords in Washington have carefully secured for themselves—for roughly half the cost that <i>you</i> must pay for the most meager, bare-bones, low-end Bronze coverage in existence. Or, alternatively, he can have:</p>
<ul>
<li>a Gold plan for about one-third of what you pay for the Bronze;</li>
<li>a Silver plan for one-twelfth of what you pay for the Bronze; or</li>
<li>his own Bronze plan for <i>less than four-tenths of 1 percent</i> of what you pay for the same plan.</li>
</ul>
<p>And why is Joe able to do all this? Because you, my generous comrade, are largely buying his plan for him. Hooray for you! Hooray for advancing the vision that our president so eloquently laid bare just one month ago, when he identified the eradication of “inequality” as the motive that “drives everything I do in this office.” Ain&#8217;t it wonderful to be part of such a grand crusade?</p>
<p>And in case you seek additional cause for celebration, rest assured that Obamacare imposes the same type of fairness and equity on family plans as it does on individual plans. For instance, a 54-year-old San Francisco couple with two grown children (ages 19 and 20) living at home—and with a $94,200 household income (the income level at which subsidies are no longer available)—can enroll in a bare-bones Bronze family plan (with an annual deductible of $10,000) for an average monthly premium of $1,175. Meanwhile, an identically structured San Francisco family whose household income is $32,500—just above the level that would have qualified them for Medicaid—can obtain a Bronze plan for precisely $4 per month. Yes, the same plan that costs $14,100 per year for the first family, costs <i>$48 per year</i> for the second family.</p>
<p>The four Silver family plans, meanwhile, have an average monthly premium of $1,593 for the first family, and $81 per month for the second family. Annual outlays would be $19,116 for the first family, vs. $972 for the second family.</p>
<p>This, in a nutshell, is the exquisite beauty of Obamacare: It is redistribution … er, um, er … It is neighborliness on a scale never before seen in this country. And many millions of Americans are poised to reap its glorious benefits! As a form of shorthand, you can simply refer to these fortunate millions as “Democrats,” in honor of the party of benefactors that is, at this very moment, purchasing their eternal political allegiance with your dollars. Take pride in the fact that this wonderful arrangement is but one aspect of the “fundamental transformation” of America that our president is so faithfully pursuing, true to his word. At its essence, it is an arrangement designed to take from certain individuals according to their ability to pay, while giving to other individuals according to their need—a profoundly neat and elegant formula if ever there was one. It almost makes you wonder if anyone else has ever thought of anything like it before.[1]</p>
<p><b>NOTE:</b></p>
<p>[1] A central principle of Marxism, popularized by Karl Marx himself, is this: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>The Inequality Smokescreen</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-inequality-smokescreen/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-inequality-smokescreen</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-inequality-smokescreen/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Jan 2014 05:16:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrat]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wall Street]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214638</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How progressivism continues to discard the philosophical foundations of the Constitution.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/oi.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214642" alt="US President Barack Obama delivers remarks on the economy" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/oi-450x292.jpg" width="315" height="204" /></a>Desperate for a diversion from the disasters of Obamacare, the president has conjured up the old leftist “income inequality” cliché. His court-pundits complain that “the richest nation on earth is starting to resemble a banana republic,” according to <i>The New Republic</i>, while Berkeley Professor Robert Reich has thundered against “casino capitalism,” blaming it for “the greatest concentration of the nation’s income and wealth at the very top since the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, with the richest 400 Americans owning as much as the bottom 150 million put together.” Democrats, no doubt cheered by left-over-leftist Bill de Blasio’s election as mayor of New York, and excited by his Occupy Wall Street rants, apparently believe that such class-warfare rhetoric is a political winner. So be prepared for more of the same, and for demands to raise the minimum wage and gouge even more money from the “millionaires and billionaires.”</p>
<p>Fretting over income inequality, however, has little to do with economic reality. It’s a statistical sleight-of-hand that counts only “money income” and ignores non-cash transfers in order to decry how much more income the top 1% are earning compared to everybody else. In fact, when the value of government transfers such as Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit are included in calculating income, <a href="http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/123566">income inequality actually declined</a> 1.8% between 1993 and 2009. Equally revealing is the fact that in 2005 those in the bottom 20% of earners consumed almost twice their income, again because of the value of non-cash transfers. And that doesn’t count the underground economy, everything from working for cash to more unsavory occupations. That’s why the statistical <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/what-is-poverty">poor enjoy living standards higher</a> than the average European. And that’s the real point––not how much the rich have, but how much everybody else does.</p>
<p>So what is all this hyperventilating about, apart from political demagoguery? Don’t underestimate the sheer ignorance of some people about how free-market capitalism works. They seem to think of wealth in medieval terms, as fixed resources like land, herds, forests, or precious metals that can be divided only so many times, a zero-sum process that requires some to have less for others to have more. Capitalism, of course, creates new wealth that is widely distributed, the riches of one leading to a higher standard of living for many. Microsoft founder Bill Gates is worth $78.5 billion, but his company and related businesses have created 14.7 million jobs globally. For every dollar Microsoft earns, affiliated companies earn $7.79. That’s the genius of capitalism, which allows a few to get rich and in the process make millions of others not necessarily rich, but better off than they were.</p>
<p>More important than ignorance of kindergarten economics, though, is the radical egalitarianism that has always been the bane of democracies since ancient Athens––the notion, as Aristotle said, “that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.” Genuine equality––the equality of all under the law, and the equality of opportunity––will not satisfy the radical egalitarian. He must have equality of result, and since the most obvious and galling sign of inequality is that of property and wealth, he will then demand redistribution of property to move closer to that aim.</p>
<p>The American Founders understood this nexus of egalitarianism, the unequal distribution of property, and political strife. As James Madison put it, “The diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of Government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results: and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.”</p>
<p>Notice that Madison assumes that the unequal distribution of ability, hard work, virtue, or even luck, all of which create the inequality of wealth, is an unchanging fact of human nature. As a result, those with more wealth, and those with less, will form different factions that will attempt to dominate the government in order to advance their interests. The Founders were particularly wary of the majority dominating the government and using its power to redistribute the property of the better off, at the same time they understood that the rich would use political power to their advantage. As Gouverneur Morris said during the Constitutional convention, “The Rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did. They always will. The proper security [against] them is to form them into a separate interest. The two forces will then control each other . . . By thus combining and setting apart, the aristocratic interest, the popular interest will be combined [against] it. There will be a mutual check and mutual security.”</p>
<p>Hence the Constitutional order of checks and balances was created on this foundation of clashing interests in order to keep one faction from tyrannizing over everybody else.</p>
<p>Obviously, this harping on income inequality is just another example of how progressivism has discarded the philosophical foundations of the Constitution. Rejecting the unequal distribution of ability and virtue among people that Madison recognized, the Progressives under Woodrow Wilson believed that unjust social and economic institutions accounted for inequality of income, and they wanted to increase the power of the state to correct this injustice. Thus early in the 20<sup>th</sup> century Progressives pursued what in 1918 economist E.R.A. Seligman called “fiscal justice” by successfully pushing for the Income Tax. Seligman was commenting on the 1917 Tax Act, which lowered exemptions and raised rates. This increase came a year after the 1916 Revenue Act, which had nearly doubled the 7% top rate established 3 years earlier by the Sixteenth Amendment, and created an inheritance tax. The <i>New Republic </i>called this expansion “a powerful equalitarian attack upon swollen incomes.” Since then the income tax has become the ever-expanding revenue stream for achieving the progressive aim to “pass the prosperity around,” as Albert Beveridge said at the 1912 Progressive Party presidential nominating convention. A hundred years on, the progressive Democrats are still attempting to use federal taxing power to defy human nature, the free market, and the Constitution in order to mount an “equalitarian attack on swollen incomes” and to “spread the wealth around,” as Obama famously said.</p>
<p>The rhetoric of class warfare, however, exploits a more unsavory dimension of democratic man’s desire for absolute equality, one noticed by Alexis de Tocqueville in <i>Democracy in America</i>. “It cannot be denied,” Tocqueville wrote, “that democratic institutions strongly tend to promote the feeling of envy in the human heart; not so much because they afford to everyone the means of rising to the same level as others as because those means perpetually disappoint the persons who employ them. Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy.” Equality of opportunity means the chance to rise as high as one’s talents, virtues, and hard work can take him. Too often those who fail will refuse to accept their lack of these qualities and blame those who possess them, and in the “acrimony of disappointment,” Tocqueville writes, find “superiority, how legitimate it may be” to be “irksome in [their] sight.”</p>
<p>This envy and resentment is readily fostered and exploited by politicians seeking support for increasing spending on welfare and entitlements in order to maintain their own power and increase that of the state. Meanwhile, welfare destroys the virtues and habits necessary for success, while punitive taxation, deficit spending, bloated government, and intrusive regulation all hurt economic growth and reduce opportunities for those who do want to better themselves.</p>
<p>Obviously, modern “income inequality” rhetoric is a political smokescreen, which explains its inconsistencies. We do not hear Obama and the Democrats decrying the bloated incomes of progressive actors, television talk-show hosts, rap moguls, or sports stars. Their demonization of Wall Street doesn’t stop them from accepting campaign contributions from investment bankers or working for Goldman Sachs after leaving government. Worse yet, they are completely indifferent to the assault on the Constitutional order this rhetoric represents, or the divisiveness sown among the citizens by stirring up destructive passions like envy and resentment. All they care about is keeping their own power and privilege no matter what the social and economic costs.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>The Poverty of Income Inequality</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-poverty-of-income-inequality/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-poverty-of-income-inequality</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-poverty-of-income-inequality/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Dec 2013 05:30:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[inequality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poverty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213353</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The real issue is the standard of living.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/df.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213358" alt="df" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/df-450x302.jpg" width="315" height="211" /></a>The left lives from social crisis to social crisis. Now it is leaping nimbly away from its last mess, the great crisis of the uninsured (who have decided to stay uninsured despite Obamacare&#8217;s fines) over to the great crisis of income inequality.</p>
<p>If you believe the left, the leading economic problem that Americans face today is not a lack of jobs or the cost of living, but a crisis of CEO salaries.</p>
<p>The crisis of income inequality, in which some people make a lot more money than everyone else, is irrelevant in an economy where the problem is not that incomes aren&#8217;t high enough, but that they don&#8217;t buy enough, and that there still aren&#8217;t enough jobs at minimum wage or any other wage.</p>
<p>The left’s answer to the high price of medical care wasn&#8217;t to discuss why prices were so high, but to wrap the whole thing in a planned medical economy of price controls and resource limitations administered by death panels whose existence they deny.</p>
<p>Its solution to cost of living issues is to raise the minimum wage. That&#8217;s a slogan that sounds good, because everyone knows more money means more money. At least until you remember that the dollar, like an Obama promise, has no absolute buying power value. And the availability of jobs isn&#8217;t a fixed value either. Raising the minimum wage eliminates jobs and raises the cost of living so that those who keep their jobs now have more money that buys the same amount.</p>
<p>The left’s agenda isn&#8217;t to make life better for the people at the bottom of the economic ladder. It&#8217;s to build up their planned economy with failed solutions that aren’t meant to solve anything. The left&#8217;s solutions don&#8217;t work, because the problem they’re solving isn’t economic inequity, but their own lack of absolute power. And they solve that with economic solutions that fail, necessitating more power grabs until they have complete control.</p>
<p>The progressive solution to income inequality is government intervention. But when has centralization ever produced income equality?</p>
<p>The USSR was the ultimate experiment in central planning. The Soviet Constitution declared, &#8220;The principle applied in the U.S.S.R. is that of socialism: From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Soviet Union was supposed to be a classless society. Western leftists assumed that was true. They were wrong. Not only did the Soviet Union have a rigid hierarchy of classes, but<a href="http://akarlin.com/2012/06/ayn-stalin/"> it also had the same income inequality </a>as any other economy in its class.</p>
<p>After WW2, the wealthiest ten percent of Russians took home <a href="http://akarlin.com/2012/06/ayn-stalin/">more than seven times</a> as much as the poorest Russians did.</p>
<p>Factory bosses took home 100 times the salary of factory workers. Managers made five times what their employees did. A small percentage of the country wallowed in luxury while a sizable underclass struggled to put food on the table. And these figures are hopelessly inadequate to describe real income inequality in the USSR because most of the real income at the top went unreported because it was derived from corruption and bribery which were and are widespread.</p>
<p>But it wasn&#8217;t income inequality in the USSR that led to poverty and misery. It was the planned economy whose control of the means of production created product shortages by not producing what people wanted, rather what it thought they should have, and whose control over the means of distribution made the black market into the only real source of needed products.</p>
<p>The gap between the rich and the poor matters less than what the poor can buy for their money. That is why the left would rather talk about income inequality than the standard of living. It wants to play around with wealth redistribution, instead of dismantling their programs that make life so expensive. The same hypocrites jabbering about income inequality dream of imposing a Green carbon tax on everyone that will further raise the prices of all goods and services.</p>
<p>The left inflicts poverty and then campaigns against it. It raises the prices of products and the cost of services, it devalues incomes, destroys jobs and raises energy prices… and demands even more regulatory powers so that it can finally solve the poverty mess it creates once and for all.</p>
<p>Even if we assume that income inequality, rather than the standard of living, is the issue to focus on, the worst possible way to achieve it is through more centralization. Free enterprise top 1 and 10 percent incomes are vulnerable to market fluctuations. That&#8217;s not the case in the Socialist sphere where incomes remain high regardless of economic performance.</p>
<p>A CEO who runs a company as badly as Obama runs the country risks his job. Obama risks nothing.</p>
<p>Washington D.C. is a great place to talk about income inequality <a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-03-08/local/35446235_1_income-inequality-earners-dc-fiscal-policy-institute">because it has one of the highest </a>levels of income inequality in the country. Obama declared that income inequality is the defining challenge of our time. It&#8217;s a challenge localized in the very cities that voted for him.</p>
<p>Progressives might try to argue that Obama won those cities based on the support of the poor,  but he also <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/man-of-the-people-obama-won-8-of-10-wealthiest-counties/">won 8 of the 10 wealthiest counties</a> in the nation. Not only did he win them, but he won them by margins greater than the national vote. And that shouldn&#8217;t be surprising, since of the wealthiest men in America, numbers one and two were both strong supporters of his campaign.</p>
<p>But the left doesn&#8217;t actually hate the rich. To do that it would have to hate itself.</p>
<p>Occupy Wall Street wasn&#8217;t a bunch of unemployed workers looking for a more compassionate economy. <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/study-shows-occupy-wall-street-was-the-1-percent/">A third of the Occupiers</a> had household incomes of six figures. The majority were college grads and 39 percent of the latter had graduate degrees.</p>
<p>The left does hate people who work for a living. The poster child for its childish screeds is Elizabeth Warren, a populist voice of the people <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/woman-of-the-people-elizabeth-warren-buys-740000-condo/">who spent three-quarters of a million</a> on a condo as soon as she got to Washington D.C. and who <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/elizabeth-warren-didnt-get-rich-on-her-own-the-clintons-made-her-rich/">once scored $90,000 from </a>the government for serving as an expert witness.</p>
<p>Elizabeth Warren was right and wrong when she said that no one gets rich on their own. There are people who do get rich on their own. And there are people like her who get rich through their political connections. The left hates people who work for their money and get rich on their own. It loves &#8220;public servants&#8221; like her who get rich off their political connections.</p>
<p>The left argues that the income inequality in this country shows that we have an oligarchy. They&#8217;re right. And they&#8217;re the oligarchy.</p>
<p>In Washington D.C. there is an oligarchy that monopolizes wealth and loots the working people. It&#8217;s a government oligarchy just as it was in the Soviet Union. America doesn&#8217;t have an income inequality problem. It has a government problem.</p>
<p>The growth of government has lowered the standard of living. The <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/44962589">standard of living peaked</a> before Obama took office and fell in the <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2011/1019/A-long-steep-drop-for-Americans-standard-of-living">sharpest such drop in recorded American</a> history.</p>
<p>The left can shriek about raising the minimum wage all it likes, but the American worker today makes<a href="http://www.thestreet.com/story/11480568/1/us-standard-of-living-has-fallen-more-than-50-opinion.html"> 57% less an hour than he did in 1970</a>. The left can play its class warfare games, but they cannot and will not restore the standard of living that Americans had in 1970.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.  </b></p>
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		<title>I Lived Through the Real ObamaCare</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/borek-volarik/i-lived-through-the-real-obamacare/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=i-lived-through-the-real-obamacare</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/borek-volarik/i-lived-through-the-real-obamacare/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 26 Mar 2013 04:20:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Borek Volarik]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Czech Socialist Republic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[inequality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[medical service]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=183033</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It was bad in the Czech Socialist Republic -- but it wasn't as bad as in Cuba, where patients have to bring their own sheets to the hospital. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/borek-volarik/i-lived-through-the-real-obamacare/ob6/" rel="attachment wp-att-183059"><img class=" wp-image-183059 alignleft" title="ob6" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ob6.jpg" alt="" width="280" height="214" /></a>In the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic all health care was free for everybody! Oh, what a paradise….well, until you actually experienced the “worker’s paradise,” as the communists proudly called it, in real life.</p>
<p>First, everybody contributed to the cost of the health care, but in a hidden way – through the income tax. There were no tax returns to be filed at the end of year. All taxes were automatically deducted from the gross pay. There were no write offs. The only difference was in marital status and number of children. The young, single people, paid a so-called “ox tax.”  That was a bit alleviated by marriage and then every newborn child lowered the tax and generated so called “child bonuses.” The state used the money from the taxes to cover all the state’s spending &#8212; health care being one of them.</p>
<p>Well, you get what you pay for, right? Right!</p>
<p>What do you expect from a dentist on a salary set by the state’s pay scales? How about a really ugly crown and no anesthetics (Novocain was in short supply, distributed by the state to dentists  by a system of rations on monthly a basis); well, a small envelope with big money…casually left at the receptionist’s desk, would make miracles.</p>
<p>What do you expect from a doctor on a state’s salary? Don’t you worry, you always got your aspirin!</p>
<p>People were assigned to general practice health centers according their address. Nobody was allowed to veer out of his or her health care district. In the waiting rooms you would always see some elderly people, sitting on white painted benches, discussing their illnesses. The free doctor visits were welcomed opportunities for the pensioners to socialize and commiserate about life. The district doctors gave out aspirins and recommended patients to specialists, generally located in hospitals. The specialists did not have their own offices and practices. They were simply employed by hospitals on fixed salaries (the only extra pay would be generated by overtimes and shift bonuses for nights).</p>
<p>Once hospitalized, you would not have “your doctor.” You would be completely under the control of the hospital’s staff.</p>
<p>The rooms were large, with six, eight, ten….beds. It was really busy during visiting hours (Wednesday afternoon and Sundays) with visitors sitting or standing around their hospitalized family members, depending on how many chairs were scoured from halls and other rooms. Some visitors just carried a little folding stool with them and so they could always sit down.</p>
<p>It still was not as bad as in, say, Cuba, where patients have to bring their own sheets to the hospital. However, if you had to stay in the hospital for a prolonged period of time, it was customary to drop every once in a while an envelope with some money into the large pocket on the nurse’s apron. That way you would make sure that your sheets were changed on a regular basis, the cup of tea would be on your night stand without a long waiting period.</p>
<p>There were actually two health care systems. One for the ordinary mortals, one for the elites like well positioned communists and top athletes.</p>
<p>I had some problems with my lower jaw. I did not want to have a surgery in an ordinary hospital. It was a bit scary for me. So I waited till I was in the military (mandatory draft at age of nineteen, two years service). Then I started complaining about my problems and, exactly as I planned, I was sent from the small town where I was located to the Central Military Hospital in Prague. There I underwent surgery; total success, everything was hunky-dory. They used a totally new procedure on me, at the time yet unknown in the ordinary hospitals.</p>
<p>I spent about two months in that top notch hospital. Being bored, I volunteered to work as appointment clerk at the dentistry department. Folks, those machines they had there… I had never seen machines like that. All modern “painless” drills, luxurious seats, etc.</p>
<p>My duty was to pull patients&#8217; file from the file cabinet, mark his appointment time and time of arrival and then slip the file into a tray at the designated dentist’s station. Of course, I was curious about the names on the tabs sticking out from the files in hanging folders. So I looked at those names. I saw names of top communists, members of the government and the Central Committee, Politburo, famous athletes. I just shivered with excitement.</p>
<p>There was one funny episode. When my mother was leaving the hospital after visiting with me, she spotted the surgeon who performed the operation. He was digging foundations for a garage at the house where he lived. With a pick axe. My mother was totally thrown off kilt.</p>
<p>I did not understand what made her so upset. She exclaimed: He will ruin his hands!</p>
<p>You know, even at the Central Military Hospital, the salaries were not that high. Later this surgeon was delegated by the state to set up a plastic surgery center in Switzerland (that guy happened to be a real genius), so, I believe, he saved his hands and made some real money. I mean “real” money as the communist Czech Crown was not accepted for international exchange. It was basically kind of “prison money,” usable only inside the country.</p>
<p>Oh, by the way: After my arrival in America, the American dentists re-did virtually all the dental work that we brought with us inside our mouths. Some dentist just could not believe what they found in my and my wife’s and mouths. They threw it all in the garbage.</p>
<p><em>Borek Volarik defected from the communist Czechoslovakian military in 1980. </em></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Mysticism of &#8216;Social Justice&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/thomas-sowell/the-mysticism-of-social-justice/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-mysticism-of-social-justice</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/thomas-sowell/the-mysticism-of-social-justice/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Jun 2012 04:05:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[inequality]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[social justice]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=135942</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A phrase that has stopped many people from thinking for at least a century -- and counting. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/data-620x411.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-135944" title="data-620x411" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/data-620x411.gif" alt="" width="375" height="248" /></a>If there were a Hall of Fame for political rhetoric, the phrase &#8220;social justice&#8221; would deserve a prominent place there. It has the prime virtue of political catchwords: It means many different things to many different people.</p>
<p>In other words, if you are a politician, you can get lots of people, with different concrete ideas, to agree with you when you come out boldly for the vague generality of &#8220;social justice.&#8221;</p>
<p>Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catchword can stop thought for 50 years. The phrase &#8220;social justice&#8221; has stopped many people from thinking, for at least a century — and counting.</p>
<p>If someone told you that Country A had more &#8220;social justice&#8221; than Country B, and you had all the statistics in the world available to you, how would you go about determining whether Country A or Country B had more &#8220;social justice&#8221;? In short, what does the phrase mean in practice — if it has any concrete meaning?</p>
<p>In political and ideological discussions, the issue is usually whether there is some social injustice. Even if we can agree that there is some injustice, what makes it social?</p>
<p>Surely most of us are repelled by the thought that some people are born into dire poverty, while others are born into extravagant luxury — each through no fault of their own and no virtue of their own. If this is an injustice, does that make it social?</p>
<p>The baby born into dire poverty might belong to a family in Bangladesh, and the one born to extravagant luxury might belong to a family in America. Whose fault is this disparity or injustice? Is there some specific society that caused this? Or is it just one of those things in the world that we wish was very different?</p>
<p>If it is an injustice, it is unjust from some cosmic perspective, an unjust fate, rather than necessarily an unjust policy, institution or society.</p>
<p>Making a distinction between cosmic justice and social justice is more than just a semantic fine point. Once we recognize that there are innumerable causes of innumerable disparities, we can no longer blithely assume that either the cause or the cure can be found in the government of a particular society.</p>
<p>Anyone who studies geography in any depth can see that different peoples and nations never had the same exposure to the progress of the rest of the human race.</p>
<p>People living in isolated mountain valleys have for centuries lagged behind the progress of people living in busy ports, where both new products and new ideas constantly arrive from around the world.</p>
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		<title>Obama’s Inequality Illusion</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jlaksin/obama%e2%80%99s-inequality-illusion/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama%25e2%2580%2599s-inequality-illusion</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Apr 2012 04:30:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[economic growth]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=127796</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the president gets it wrong on the "fundamental" issue of our time.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Obama.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-127797" title="Obama" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Obama-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" /></a>Lashing out at the Congressional Republican budget earlier this week, President Obama <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-obama-speech-transcript-20120403,0,7053881.story">chastised</a> the GOP for ignoring what he called one of the “big, fundamental issues” of our time: inequality.</p>
<p>“What drags down our entire economy is when there&#8217;s an ever-widening chasm between the ultra-rich and everybody else,” Obama claimed. He went on to insist that addressing inequality was not only an important moral cause in its own right but also an economic priority, since “research has shown that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.” It was a theme Obama has sounded repeatedly in his first term, most famously last December in his speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, in which he claimed that “breathtaking greed” in America was the cause of America’s economic woes and belied America’s national promise that “this is a place where you can make it if you try.”</p>
<p>Obama is not completely wrong. America’s rich have indeed gotten richer. A 2011 report by the Congressional Budget Office pointed out that between 1979 and 2007 after-tax income for the highest-income households grew more than for any other group. Altogether, between 1980 and 2005, 80 percent of the total increase in incomes went to the top 1 percent of American households. But before enlisting in the nearest “Occupy” protest, it’s worth considering some of the complications with the inequality picture presented by Obama.</p>
<p>Authors Peter Wehner and Robert Beschel have done just that in a new <a href="http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/how-to-think-about-inequality">essay</a> in the public policy journal <em>National Affairs</em>. One problem with focusing on the increase of wealth at the very top, the authors note, is that it is misleading. The reality is that the income of individual households is not static. People have always moved up and down on the scale of income distribution, and that remains true today. Thus the CBO points out that the population with income in the lowest 20 percent in 1979 was not necessarily the population in that quintile in 2007. Similarly, the authors report, about half of those in the bottom income quintile in 1996 had moved up to a higher income category by 2005, even as 30 percent of those in the top income group in 1996 had fallen down to a lower quintile by 2005. Contrary to what Obama suggests, income distribution is not etched in stone.</p>
<p>Further, an exclusive focus on the rise of incomes among the highest earners ignores the disparate effect of taxes on the rich. Even as the top 1 percent has seen a significant rise in their wealth, they have also paid a disproportionate share of the country’s taxes. The top 1 percent of income earners now pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes, according to the CBO, more than double the less than 20 percent that they paid in the 1970s. While the point is often lost in Obama’s appeals for “fairness” and higher taxes on the rich, the fact is that among the world’s richest nations, America already imposes the largest share of income taxes on its rich, exceeding even socialist countries like Sweden.</p>
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		<title>The New Israel Fund&#8217;s View of a &#8220;New Israel&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jacob-shrybman/the-new-israel-funds-view-of-a-new-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-new-israel-funds-view-of-a-new-israel</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jacob-shrybman/the-new-israel-funds-view-of-a-new-israel/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Feb 2010 05:02:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Shrybman]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=50375</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The anti-Israel organization shares Hamas' dream for Israel's future.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/nif.gif"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-50380" title="nif" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/nif.gif" alt="" width="470" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>When it was reported that the New Israel Fund (NIF) was paying around $8 million to organizations that provided the Goldstone Report with all of its condemnations of Israel, it became clear that the “New Israel” desired by the New Israel Fund is one with more than 9 years of consistent rocket fire.</p>
<p>Our organization, <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.sderotmedia.org.il/" target="_blank">Sderot Media Center</a> (SMC), with a yearly budget of close to $200,000, worked tirelessly on a formal report that was requested by the Goldstone Commission itself, which encompassed the impact of the rocket fire on the residents of the Sderot region. We sent this <a rel="nofollow" href="http://sderotmedia.org.il/bin/content.cgi?ID=484&amp;q=3,6" target="_blank">formal report</a> accompanied by photographs and videos to depict to this UN committee, which did not visit Sderot, what it is like to live under either daily rocket fire or the threat of daily rocket fire over the course of then eight years. The Goldstone Committee then flew our director, Noam Bedein, to the UN Headquarters in Geneva to give a <a rel="nofollow" href="http://sderotmedia.org.il/bin/content.cgi?ID=489&amp;q=2,3,6" target="_blank">30-minute presentation/testimony</a> in front of the committee on this daily reality lived in Sderot.</p>
<p>The New Israel Fund paid around $8 million to organizations that provided information to the Goldstone Report. As a cited provider of information for the Goldstone Report, I guess our New Israel Fund check got lost in the mail.</p>
<p>As the only organization providing the human story of the near decade of rocket fire on Israeli men, women and children, the NIF clearly had no intention of helping sponsor our work.</p>
<p>A clear majority of the organizations mentioned in the Goldstone Report, 77%, are organizations that were paid by the NIF. Amongst those organizations, an overwhelming majority of the ones that were in favor of the report, 92%, are organizations that were paid by the NIF.</p>
<p>The New Israel Fund, an organization that supposedly prides itself on democracy and human rights, <em>“We fight inequality, injustice and extremism because we understand that justice is the precondition for a successful democracy</em>,” as defined in their “<em>About Us</em>” &#8212; strategically and financially ignores the human rights of Sderot men, women, and children that have endured this rocket lifestyle since 2001. The one organization located in Sderot that was paid by the NIF was an organization called the Other Voice &#8212; that led a bike ride from Sderot to the Gaza border. Apparently, organizations in Sderot are only worth NIF money if they are speaking out for Gaza residents and riding a bike.</p>
<p>The head of the NIF, Naomi Chazan, has led the response to this Im Tirtzu report by touting terms like “democracy” to describe what she is supporting, and <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1149056.html" target="_blank">“fascists”</a> is what she has called those who criticize the NIF. A well educated professor like herself should know that democracy is not achieved by Hamas viciously controlling a prisoner population and using them as shields from a sovereign army and paying the UN to enable Hamas to further persevere doesn’t help. A democracy does not put over 100,000 Gaza children through summer military training camps. So, in attempting to bring down the only democracy in the world with international war crimes, Chazan hopes to create her “New Israel” democracy where Hamas can cause the death of more of their children, train more of them to fight Jews, and freely fire rockets at neighboring Israeli children.</p>
<p>A well educated professor like herself, Chazan should know that calling people and organizations that criticize the NIF “fascists” is embarrassingly hypocritical &#8212; while she pays and supports the ongoing actions of terrorists who use their own civilians to target other civilians. The Sderot Media Center criticizes the NIF and Naomi Chazan. So are we that risk our lives day-in and day-out to show the world that rockets are targeting civilians, and whom the popular liberal newspaper <em><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1135894.html" target="_blank">Haaretz described as a</a></em> “tiny organization that fights to make Sderot’s voice heard” &#8212; are we fascists? Our center runs a therapeutic drama program, in which traumatized high school girls share and express themselves with psychology professionals. Are these traumatized Sderot girls fascists?</p>
<p>If one reads the report put out by Im Tirtzu about the NIF paying for 77% of the Israeli condemning UN Goldstone Report, one will see how NIF paid more than half a million dollars to Physicians For Human Rights-Israel to send an Israeli condemning report to the Goldstone Committee that completely ignored the over 9,000 psychological patients in Sderot. This is just one example of the strategic financing of biased information that shaped the Goldstone Report.</p>
<p>If the public and donors of the New Israel Fund allow this organization to continue, it will be an upside-down “New Israel” where girls expressing  their trauma are considered fascists and a democracy is where children are put through terrorist training and used as human shields.</p>
<p>I guess, along with an invitation to last week’s Islamic Revolution anniversary rally in Teheran, our New Israel Fund check got lost in the mail.</p>
<p><em>Jacob Shrybman is a writer for the Sderot Media Center <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.sderotmedia.org.il/" target="_blank">(SderotMedia.org.il).</a></em></p>
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		<title>Heather Mac Donald: A Crime Theory Demolished &#8211; WSJ.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/heather-mac-donald-a-crime-theory-demolished-wsj-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=heather-mac-donald-a-crime-theory-demolished-wsj-com</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/heather-mac-donald-a-crime-theory-demolished-wsj-com/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:38:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=44978</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice. As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008, criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice. As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008, criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the &#8220;root causes&#8221; theory holds, begets criminals. Instead, the opposite happened. Over seven million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s. The consequences of this drop for how we think about social order are significant.</p>
<p>The notion that crime is an understandable reaction to poverty and racism took hold in the early 1960s. Sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin argued that juvenile delinquency was essentially a form of social criticism. Poor minority youth come to understand that the American promise of upward mobility is a sham, after a bigoted society denies them the opportunity to advance. These disillusioned teens then turn to crime out of thwarted expectations.</p>
<p>The theories put forward by Cloward, who spent his career at Columbia University, and Ohlin, who served presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, provided an intellectual foundation for many Great Society-era programs. From the Mobilization for Youth on Manhattan&#8217;s Lower East Side in 1963 through the federal Office of Economic Opportunity and a host of welfare, counseling and job initiatives, their ideas were turned into policy.</p>
<p>If crime was a rational response to income inequality, the thinking went, government can best fight it through social services and wealth redistribution, not through arrests and incarceration. Even law enforcement officials came to embrace the root causes theory, which let them off the hook for rising lawlessness. Through the late 1980s, the FBI&#8217;s annual national crime report included the disclaimer that &#8220;criminal homicide is largely a societal problem which is beyond the control of the police.&#8221; Policing, it was understood, can only respond to crime after the fact; preventing it is the domain of government welfare programs.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703580904574638024055735590.html">Heather Mac Donald: A Crime Theory Demolished &#8211; WSJ.com</a>.</p>
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