Richard D. Wolff

This is an endlessly recyled conservative mantra designed to undermine the overwhelming consensus of the economic profession on how (a) income and wealth inequality have grown in the IUS over the last 40 years, and (b) how transfer payments and other redistributive schemes have only marginally modified the growing inequality. In response to Samuelson again beating the dead horse, think of these issues: (1) is military expenditure a transfer program from the people to the military-industrial complex, and if so, what does that do to the numbers he wants us to look at, (2) "the rich and upper middle classes" (whatever exactly that means" mostly dont pay social security taxes (and even fewer will once ACA is repealed) which account for almost half of what is raised by the federal govt and specifically exempts non-labor income (the super rich get most of their income from property, not labor) and all income above roughly $120,000 per year, and so on. More importantly, consider this: the origin, cause, and rationale for transfer payments follows from the failure of US capitalism - i.e. its leaders, the employers as a class - to provide jobs with adequate incomes to sustain the population. Letting that underemployed and/or underpaid population starve or die is dangerous for the system, so capitalists take a portion of the profits they get from how they treat the working class and give that back to them to pacify them, make them dependent on the govt and hesitant to rebel. To cast this sorry situation as some sort of burden on the rich derived from the poor is to turn an unjust world upside down in order to flatter those who cause the entire problem by their maintenance of a capitalism that has outlived its usefulness or value to the majority of people.

The British magazine The Economist reached a parallel conclusion this last week: namely that the US was no longer a "full democracy" and had dropped to a "flawed democracy" (their terms). The bottom line in these studies is that US capitalism is in a state of decline that confuses its people (who were in no way prepared for this), worries them, invites demogoues to feast at the scapegoating possibilities, produced Brexit, trump and other right-wing flailings. Sadly, everything but the system itself - the organization of production into adversarial employers (always a small minority) and employees (always the majority) - can be brought up to express people's anxieties about a system in decline. Progress and solution depends, however, on being able to identify, discuss and reach some consensus about system change as necessary to engage as well.

Thanks for alerting us......similar things happening in US ad colleges and universities replicate businesses with big raises fo top execs and austerity for everyone else.

Maybe NPR fears what Trump plans to do to its government support and so produces such stuff. Sure, there are multiple ways of looking at poverty (s at anything and everything), but when the prevailing perspectives across countless academic, media, and governmental studies speak to rising inequality, and when even major political candidates refer to disappearing middle classes and other slogans of rising inequality, one has to wonder not about the possibility of some sort of analysis that reaches an alternative conclusion but about the motives of someone who wants to use that analysis to question the prevailing view. By the way, GINI numbers inside countries have mostly shown growing inequality too. Across countries its a bit different because chiefly the stunning economic development of the People's Republic of China (even as inequality inside PRC grows too). Then too there are the myriad problems with the concept and measurement of Gini coefficients which add further wonderment about why an NPR report would use them to undermine the prevailing view of inequality's growth.

The simple answer is yes. We seek alliances with all sorts of social forces to advance the campaign for social change grounded in a democratic transformation of the workplace. A social transition from an economy dominated by the capitalist economic system (the employer-employee division at work) to one in which worker cooperatives prevail (where employer and employee have merged into the same persons functioning democratically on all major enterprise decisions) is our goal. Once labor unions and worker coop organizations were allies in US history. I see no reason why that cannot happen again; it should.

While there are multiple reasons for the right's focus on abortion, since you ask about an economic side or reason, let me offer a comment. Middle and upper income Americans who want abortions have been able to obtain them through much of history by using their money to go to where they are illegal or to purchase them illegally. Banning legal abortions is mostly a problem for poorer people who cannot then access abortions. They will thus have more children which (1) adds to the available labor pool (pushing down wages as more people compete for jobs), and (2) adds to the costs and responsibilities of parents correspondingly less likely to engage in risky political or labor union action to improve their jobs and incomes. Allowing legal abortion gives millions of families a way of taking control over so important a decision as having a child and as such might well encourage families to want to take parallel controls of other important life decisions like economic decisions  (about jobs, income distribution, govt programs, etc.); the system instinctively works against this. Another way to get at this is to see the right as a complex political alliance. That alliance includes capitalist employers who worry that they are too small a percentage of the population and thus need a mass base to ally with. If they can find a religious institution having difficulty holding onto its flock, a deal can be struck that advantages both sides. Business gets a mass base of people organized into, say, churches, who will endorse and support pro-capitalist govt policies, while the churches get business support for institutional imperatives like opposition to abortion. In the US, the Republican party has long depended on such an alliance to exist.

It is hard not to think that in these bizarre ways, even the richest, those who benefit from a capitalism in decline, a capitalism that undermines living standards and hopes for the future for most people, grasp somewhere that society is spinning our of control in dangerous ways. However unconsciously, they too sense the disintegration of social ties, social cohesion. Their reaction is not critical social analysis (they have no background, training or inclination to go that way). It is instead this sort of fantastical self-protection. Where poor and middle income folks sensing social collapse buy a gun; these folks do these things. It is another symptom of wild, angry, reactive behavior (like Brexit, or endless movies about tidal waves, earthquakes and other mega-disasters, like electing Trump, and so on). Social decay, when in advanced stages, displays all sorts of extreme symptoms.

Thank you for the article. Here ay Democracy@Work we have been following the Mondragon-USW alliance since its inception precisely to gain insights about collaborations, alliances, and cooperation between the worker coop movement and the labor movement (who, in the US, once worked together quite well a century ago).

In a capitalist enterprise, the surplus produced by "productive workers" (those engaged in directly producing the commodity sold by the enterprise) - the difference between what their labor adds to what the employer sells and what the employer pays to them as a wage - is appropriated by the employer. That employer then decides what other workers - those who provide the necessary conditions for the productive workers to perform their tasks (e.g. a clerk) - should be employed and uses the surplus from the productive workers to pay them. The employer then "negotiates" with such other workers over the conditions and payments for such work. On a worker coop, the capitalist "middleman" - namely the employer - is removed. In a worker coop, the productive workers themselves occupy both the position of productive worker but also, collectively, the position of employer. Thus the productive workers and the other workers together decide on/negotiate the conditions of and payments out of surplus for that other work. Since both productive and other workers need and depend on each other, a democratic process of making all enterprise decisions best reproduces the worker coop model of enterprise organization.

Absolutely yes. The basic point here is that economic stimulus can be achieved via trickle down (pumping money and/or demand in at the top of the economic pyramid) or trickle up (pumping money and/or demand in at the bottom of the pyramid to the poor and working classes). The political power of rich versus poor, employers vs employees, capital vs labor usually determines the government's choice between trickle up or trickle down.

Most of the decrees and rulings of Trump's first days in power worsen rather than improve the living conditions of working people, the "middle class" and so on. The freeze does likewise. So indeed do the cabinet and advisor appointments. So we have actions and appointments that largely contradict Trump's repeated commitment to rebuild the economic conditions of what he believes to be "the good old days." Frankly, so far, its his talk versus his actions and the actions speak more strongly than the talk.