The "Income Gap": envy has nothing to do with it

Syndicated columnist Ruben Navarette wrote a column the other day, titled “Education, not envy, is the answer,” contending that the current and growing concern over the widening income gap between rich and poor is just a matter of class warfare:

It's class envy – the sense that it's simply not fair that there are those who earn in an hour what it takes others to earn in a month. It doesn't help that there are plenty of politicians, commentators and pundits who shamelessly try to cultivate that resentment and use it for their own purposes.

Navarette totally misses the point. Hell, even Alan Greenspan has been raising concern. The issue is not the existence of a spread, even a wide one, between the highly educated or exceptionally talented and the lowest-paying jobs – sure, most Americans accept that as part of the Horatio Alger/Steve Jobs/Bill Gates-based social contract, for the good of innovation or even lottery winners – but that after several decades of major reductions in poverty and a generally shrinking gap between high and low incomes following the Depression – beginning sometime in the 1970s or early 1980s, we started moving in the opposite direction. That movement has been rapid, especially under – surprise, surprise – Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Bush the Elder and George Bush the Younger. With the Clinton era as a dramatic exception, and the percentage of people living in poverty has barely budged since the end of Lyndon Johnson’s supposedly failed War on Poverty. The raw numbers under Republican presidents has actually increased.

In fact, envy is a small part of it. If Britney wants diamond crusted solid-gold bathroom faucets, or Mariah wants 10,000 pairs of shoes, few people much care. Stuff happens, and the social contract has probably turned conservative enough that truly confiscatory taxes on great wealth and income (like 70-90%) probably are not perceived to be beneficial to society. (Navarette naively believes that market forces are driving the $200 million compensation of poor-performing executives, but that’s another story – too complex for this modest note.)

On the contrary, the question that concerns everyone is whether we are moving in the right direction, and we are not. The income gap is growing like icebergs are shrinking. When there is no more poverty, certainly not the obscene concept known as “the working poor,” indeed when even Wal-Mart aisle sweepers are proud union members with a 3-bedroom, a 2000 square-foot house, a few weeks of vacation and the resources to go to nice places and stay in a nice hotel – OK, think Cancun or Myrtle Beach, not St. Tropez or Aspen – then we can start worrying about class envy if we still worry about the income gap that's left. We can also start with simple things, like raising the minimum wage, universal portable health insurance, and strong protection of the right to unionize, but otherwise minimal government intervention, and people can take matters into their own hands and start taking back their rightful share of the national bounty. First things first, and Ruben doesn’t get it.