Have you heard? The percentage of the global population living on less than $1.90 per day will fall to 9.6 percent this year, the lowest it’s ever been, according to the World Bank. But Bernie “I don’t give a shit” Sanders doesn’t give a shit.
Bernie’s too worried about this crazy Trans-Pacific Partnership that the U.S. and 12 other nations have negotiated to ease open barriers to trade (a little. Free-trade nirvana this ain’t) and thus help further reduce extreme poverty around the world.
Benie doesn’t give a shit about all this because he, and a lot of other people, are in love with the good old days, when the U.S. and Europe were the only source of high-end manufactured goods, when monopolistic manufacturers charged monopolistic prices and paid monopolistic wages and “everyone” was rich, except for the billions who languished in extreme poverty. Now that cutting-edge technology has spread around the globe, well, we’re still richer than anyone else—and richer than we ever were before1—but the disparity between rich and poor nations has declined. It’s “funny” that Bernie Sanders, who fancies himself a socialist, wants to beggar the rest of the world so that we Americans can enjoy a lifestyle of unearned and undeserved privilege.
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In fact, household income probably reached a peak around 1999. I’m cheating, a little, by assuming that improvements in the quality of consumer goods since then make us “richer” than ever before. Incomes for many Americans haven’t improved over the past 15 years and this gives Bernie’s near-naked xenophobia traction. But it’s still bullshit. ↩︎
