Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote a contemptuous take down of Thomas Piketty’s then notorious book, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century. If anyone has been citing Piketty’s arguments in the current presidential primary season, I’ve yet to hear it, but that hardly matters, because global capitalism is taking a pounding from all quarters, a pounding thoroughly as vigorous as the one Piketty delivers, even though the grounds for complaint are very largely different.
Piketty argued that, well, that r>g, which means that over time the return on inherited wealth is greater than the growth of the economy itself, so that the advantage of inherited versus earned wealth effectively increases without limit.1 Now, nobody’s making that argument these days, but they are making the argument that free markets don’t work, that you have to look out for number one, which, according to both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, means kicking every goddamn Mexican out of the country, or, according to Bernie Sanders, means not trading with any country with wages lower than ours, because, well, according to Bernie, the Chinese like working fourteen-hour days in rice paddies fertilized with human excrement. And even if they don’t, who gives a damn? We’ve got ours, or we will, and that’s what counts. Workers of the world unite? No, workers of the world go fuck yourselves!
On the issue of immigration, Trump/Cruz xenophobia has effectively swallowed up the entire Republican Party, with the exception of the editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal, which would almost make me feel sorry for the dumb fucks if I wasn’t laughing so hard. Trump’s “ideas,” which were so “controversial” only a few months ago, have become the air Republicans breathe.
The effect of Bernieism on the Democratic Party has been almost as noxious. California and New York have both decided, in effect, to become their own private Swedens (both are far larger than the original, of course), hiving themselves off from the rest of vulgar America. Both are decreasing the number of blue-collar jobs that paleo-liberals profess to love, first by banning fracking and now by instituting a $15 dollar an hour minimum wage. Fracking creates blue-collar jobs, reduces energy costs to Americans, and reduces air pollution, and Bernie Sanders is passionately against it. When the $15 minimum hits home, carryout sales and deliveries in New York are likely to fall through the basement as residents crank up their micro-waves: nine tenths the convenience and one third the cost! Who could have predicted this?
What are the lords of Wall Street doing in response? Well, not much. It is still holy writ among Republicans that the richer you are, the bigger the tax cut you deserve, despite the fact that a series of “natural experiments” over the past twenty-four years—tax increases during the Clinton Administration, tax cuts in the Bush Administration, followed by increases during the Obama Administration—demonstrate, at the least, that increases don’t necessarily result in economic slowdowns and cuts don’t guarantee growth. Yet Republicans still insist on cutting tax revenues by trillions of dollars at the same time that, so they insist, they want to eliminate the deficit. Which is why Paul Ryan’s “budgets” are, you know, total bullshit.
At the same time that Wall Street still insists it needs a tax cut, it also insists it needs a pay raise. Over at Bloomberg, Jennifer Surane reports that “Wall Street Wages Double in 25 Years as Everyone Else’s Languish”. “The average annual wage in the industry in New York in 2014, including salary and bonus, was $404,800, almost six times as much as the $72,300 average for all other private-sector jobs, the data show. That’s wider than the margin in 2011, the year of the Occupy protests, when average wages in the securities industry in New York were about five times as much as those for all other non-government employees.”
But apparently that still isn’t good enough for the suspenders and French cuffs crowd. It seems that, these days, the really cool kids are going to Silicon Valley instead of the Street, and the thought that the Street can be run by the pretty cool kids rather than the totally coolest kids is not a thought the Street wants to think, so they want to pay themselves more money.
