PAUL KRUGMAN: Gilded Once More

[kevinmc]

One of the distinctive features of the modern American right has been nostalgia for the late 19th century, with its minimal taxation, absence of regulation and reliance on faith-based charity rather than government social programs. Conservatives from Milton Friedman to Grover Norquist have portrayed the Gilded Age as a golden age, dismissing talk of the era’s injustice and cruelty as a left-wing myth.

Well, in at least one respect, everything old is new again. Income inequality — which began rising at the same time that modern conservatism began gaining political power — is now fully back to Gilded Age levels.

Consider a head-to-head comparison. We know what John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in Gilded Age America, made in 1894, because in 1895 he had to pay income taxes. (The next year, the Supreme Court declared the income tax unconstitutional.) His return declared an income of $1.25 million, almost 7,000 times the average per capita income in the United States at the time.

But that makes him a mere piker by modern standards. Last year, according to Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine, James Simons, a hedge fund manager, took home $1.7 billion, more than 38,000 times the average income. Two other hedge fund managers also made more than $1 billion, and the top 25 combined made $14 billion. ......

http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/04/paul-krugman-gilded-once-more.html

[jobycom]

1. The comparisons to the Gilded Age abound.

The yellow press, the invasions of other nations on lies about terrorist attacks, the march towards re-institutionalizing racism and segregation. Many people forget, or were never taught, that the first civil rights movement was in the Reconstruction era, and that the first African Americans to refuse to sit at the back of the bus or take segregated seats at lunch counters or in theaters was in the Reconstruction era, that the first civil rights bills were passed in the 1860s, that segregation was illegal and was starting to fade from the South until the Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Acts of 1875, outlawing segregation, were unconstitutional in 1883, and that Plessy v Ferguson in 1896 supported the "separate but equal" doctrine that states were slowly attempting to install.

History is taught as one long progressive march from the evils of the past to the freedoms of now, but that's a flawed picture. History is full of steps backwards, as happened during the Gilded Age. Without that backwards tumble, we might now be way beyond all issues of race and economic fairness. We are moving backwards again, and not just in economic fairness, but in many aspects of equality. If we fall far enough backwards, the gains of Civil Rights in the 1960s may be as forgotten as the gains in the 1870s.