I'm not exactly sure why I torture myself with Ben Stein columns. Not only do his initials typically ring true (BS), but when reading the nonsense he spews, I hear his painstakingly boring monotone voice while reading these articles. Perhaps I'm part-masochist in a way. In any case, I now feel the need to share this excruciating experience with readers. You're welcome...
The American Spectator article Stein wrote that I'll be writing about is entitled, "Poverty and Income Inequality."
He started his "piece" in a typical Stein-ian fashion, by jumping randomly from one topic to the next, and writing this:
"I spent almost all day lying in bed listening to old Big Band music. I have not been well, and this is perfect therapy. I just let my mind run free to go down freeways and alleyways and this is where I came out...
At the intersection of Income Inequality and Poverty.
Here is what my mind dredged up."
Yeah... It's just like the time I wrote this introduction to a column:
"I was at a Metallica concert, headbanging like Beavis and Butthead, before I suddenly stopped, caught my balance before falling on my face, and had to leave the auditorium because something came to mind which I felt the urgent need to write down - something about government spending. Here is what, after taking some Advil, my mind dredged up."
Okay, so that never happened. But, anyway, please continue, Mr. Stein...
"There is an immense amount of income inequality here and everywhere. I am not sure why that is a bad thing. Some people will just be better students, harder working, more clever, more ruthless than other people. Some people will have better family connections than others. Some people will have richer parents than others. Unless we want to do away with property rights - a surefire route to dictatorship - we will have a lot of men and women who are rich by inheritance. Frankly, I feel sorry for them."
Not as sorry as I feel for the readers of this article. Please, go on...
"But it's inevitable that in a free society, some people will have more money than others. Surely some of those people got that money by looting their own stockholders. I know this for a fact. I spent decades writing about it for Barron's. There will be men in a position authority who will loot. Some of them will become famous philanderers and some famous philanthropists and some both."
Okay, so he goes from, "There is an immense amount of income inequality" to "...some people will have more money than others." Okay... Putting things a bit simply there, aren't we? Okay - you may continue...
"But there are just some people who are better with money than others and will wind up with a ton of money. There will be people who strike oil, who create new Internet toys. They fund symphonies and ballets and schools for inner city kids. They are a bulwark against tyranny because they can afford lawyers to fight overweening government.
We want for there to be a high number of rich people who function as a brake on government just as the nobles did on the crown in long ago England."
So, let's see if I've got this... "There is an immense amount of income inequality," "...some people will have more money than others," and "Some people are better with money than others and will wind up with a ton of money." Is that correct? Wow - is this a college research paper of some kind? These numbers and this evidence is awe-inspiring! Anything else, Mr. Stein?
"So I don't see why it's wrong to have income inequality. It isn't as if having a lot of rich people creates more poor people. We do not have a finite amount of money in America. There is an infinite amount and generally speaking, the more rich people there are who start businesses and or run them well, the more middle class people there are who work in them or hold stock in them."
Still a believer in trickle-down economics, eh? In theory, sure, that sounds like it could do some good. However, in actuality, that's another matter entirely. There's a reason why the income gap in this country is at a level not seen since the Great Depression - while wages have remained fairly stagnant for the middle- and lower-classes, the upper-class has seen a rather dramatic increase in their wealth. With rising prices in everything from food to healthcare to tickets to movies and concerts, that which the middle- and lower-classes could once afford they can no longer, all the while the upper-class is able to pay for such necessities and luxuries with greater ease than they could previously. So, while, no, having more rich people doesn't necessarily create more poor people, the conditions these rich people have left the middle- and lower-classes has resulted in more poor people. Anyway, back to the BS...
"So, I just don't see the problem in there being so many billionaires except for bare envy - an extremely basic emotion. It is an emotion that the politicians and academics and race haters have been able to stir up for a long, long time. It leads to jobs for Democrats but not much else."
Envy? Really? Does he really think those struggling to put food on the table for their families are really thinking, "Gee... If I were a billionaire, everything would be okay. I hate billionaires! I absolutely hate them! Ah!"? No - these families simply want to be able to live life from day to day and to provide all of life's essentials to their loved ones. What they basically want to do is survive. That's a far different cry than billionaires seeking to buy a third house, a second yacht, or a seventh car. It isn't that these lower- and middle-class individuals are envious of billionaires. It's that billionaires tend to lack empathy for the lower- and middle-classes. But, anyway, back to showing a strange amount of empathy for these very billionaires...
"But then we come to what is a real, genuine problem: poverty. It is not fine to have Americans (or Cubans or Congolese) in want, unable to afford the necessities in life. Again, I don't see why or where having a thin super rich slice affects that. But poverty is a real problem."
A thin super rich? What was this about income inequality? And poverty? How about reading the following from a CNBC report:
"The gulf between the richest 1 percent and the rest of America is the widest it's been since the Roaring '20s.
The very wealthiest Americans earned more than 19 percent of the country's household income last year - their biggest share since 1928, the year before the stock market crash. And the top 10 percent captured a record 48.2 percent of total earnings last year..."
and
"In 2012, the incomes of the top 1 percent rose nearly 20 percent compared with a 1 percent increase for the remaining 99 percent."
But, anyway, Mr. Stein, please go on...
"In olden times, poverty was the common human condition. In the USA, as recently as the Great Depression, poverty was commonplace. FDR might have exaggerated when he described one-third of the nation as 'ill housed, ill fed and ill clad...' But surely he was not far off.
Now, real poverty, where Americans lack cars or air conditioning (imagine that we now consider it poverty to lack something that was the ne plus ultra of luxury in my youth!) or solid food is extremely rare. Yes, the government designates many tens of millions as poor, but they almost always have indoor plumbing (which my mother did not have in her small town in the Catskills) and they are super nourished as opposed to mal-nourished. They get food stamps. They get free medical care. They get vouchers for many of the needs of life."
Times kind of change, Ben... ...and with regard to the claim that today's poor are "super nourished," do you consider a "healthy" dosage of McDonald's, Taco Bell, and other cheap fast food meals "super nourishing"? Want to know one reason why the obesity level is up in this country? Growing income inequality. With the increasing number of lower-class families, there has been an increasing need for cheap meals, and with those cheap fast food meals comes an increase in fat. Think that's just a myth (you know, like climate change, evolution, and gravity)? In college, I consumed a heavy dosage of fast food. What happened? I got up to 186 lbs. After I stopped eating fast food, I dropped to 150 lbs. It must have just been one of those strange coincidences... Anyway, you were saying, Mr. Monotone?
"This is not to deny their sorrow and I am sad for them. But why are they poor? Senator Elizabeth Warren, a genuine moron, not a fake one, says it's because of 'corporations.' What can that mean? Corporations are not vampires. They are aggregations of workers, owners, and customers. Senator Warren infamously noted that 'corporations don't cry,' but their workers do when government regulators shut them down for environmental infractions. Their stockholders do when mistaken federal policy causes their stock to crash so that old people cannot retire and young people cannot go to college. If you substituted the words 'groups of Americans' for 'corporations' I wonder how much applause and hatred you would whip up even at a DNC convention."
"Corporations are people, my friend..." Right... That's why when I asked a corporation to prom and didn't hear a response, I had to go alone... Anyway, back to the myth that corporations are people, Mr. Stein...
"Corporations have nothing to do with causing poverty and in fact well-run corporations like Berkshire-Hathaway generate immense income for their stockholders - largely pension funds and hospital and college endowments - that allow for ordinary people to have comfort and rest."
I wonder what Mr. Stein thinks about the following report which was just released:
"Foreign profits held overseas by U.S. corporations to avoid taxes at home nearly doubled from 2008 to 2013 to top $2.1 trillion..." Yet, it's the minority of food stamp fraudsters which we really need to worry about, right?
"What I have also observed is that government policy rarely causes poverty over the long run. Yes, Fed mistakes can cause recessions and good people are thrown out of work for a time. That unequivocally happens. But good people find new jobs or relocate. (Retraining is often, not always, a fraud.) And recessions end and we have severe labor shortages in some areas as we do now in the oil areas and Silicon Valley.
No, federal policy does not generally cause long-term unemployment and poverty. In general. Obviously, there are exceptions."
Obviously... Okay, I don't mean to seem agitated, but could we please close this up, Benjamin? Thanks...
"My humble observation is that most long-term poverty is caused by self-sabotage by individuals. Drug use. Drunkenness. Having children without a family structure. Gambling. Poor work habits. Disastrously unfortunate appearance. Above all, and counted in the preceding list, psychological problems (very much including basic laziness) cause people to be unemployed, have poor or no work habits, and enter and stray in poverty."
It's my humble observation that Ben Stein, like with many other things, is quite ignorant and prejudiced with regard to those in poverty...
"Impoverished people have personal problems. They may have had terrible childhoods. They may have been the victims of abuse. They are often the victims of their own abuse of drugs and alcohol. But they are not the victims of corporations or of the Federal Reserve. Their sad backgrounds lead them into self-destruction."
But, of course! The $2.1 trillion in taxes corporations avoided couldn't have aided the poor at all...
"Is there any public policy that can help them? We just don't know so far. But whipping up hate against the successful simply cannot do it. There is no connecting mechanism between envy and greater productivity. Quite the opposite. Envy legitimizes class hatred and idleness (see 'higher education - 2014') and produces nothing.
What will make the genuinely poor stop sabotaging themselves? Maybe, just maybe, if we let God back into the public forum it would help. I have seen spiritual solutions work miracles."
Yeah, that's going to do it. The poor will begin to prosper if they begin praying more to an invisible being. I have a better question for Ben Stein. What will make the genuinely rich stop sabotaging the poor? Maybe, just maybe, if we start passing laws to prevent this from happening with increasing frequency, maybe, just maybe, it would help those most in need...
http://spectator.org/articles/58633/poverty-and-income-inequality
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101025377
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/04/09/business/corporate-americas-offshore-cash-pile-rises-to-2-1-trillion-study/
The American Spectator article Stein wrote that I'll be writing about is entitled, "Poverty and Income Inequality."
He started his "piece" in a typical Stein-ian fashion, by jumping randomly from one topic to the next, and writing this:
"I spent almost all day lying in bed listening to old Big Band music. I have not been well, and this is perfect therapy. I just let my mind run free to go down freeways and alleyways and this is where I came out...
At the intersection of Income Inequality and Poverty.
Here is what my mind dredged up."
Yeah... It's just like the time I wrote this introduction to a column:
"I was at a Metallica concert, headbanging like Beavis and Butthead, before I suddenly stopped, caught my balance before falling on my face, and had to leave the auditorium because something came to mind which I felt the urgent need to write down - something about government spending. Here is what, after taking some Advil, my mind dredged up."
Okay, so that never happened. But, anyway, please continue, Mr. Stein...
"There is an immense amount of income inequality here and everywhere. I am not sure why that is a bad thing. Some people will just be better students, harder working, more clever, more ruthless than other people. Some people will have better family connections than others. Some people will have richer parents than others. Unless we want to do away with property rights - a surefire route to dictatorship - we will have a lot of men and women who are rich by inheritance. Frankly, I feel sorry for them."
Not as sorry as I feel for the readers of this article. Please, go on...
"But it's inevitable that in a free society, some people will have more money than others. Surely some of those people got that money by looting their own stockholders. I know this for a fact. I spent decades writing about it for Barron's. There will be men in a position authority who will loot. Some of them will become famous philanderers and some famous philanthropists and some both."
Okay, so he goes from, "There is an immense amount of income inequality" to "...some people will have more money than others." Okay... Putting things a bit simply there, aren't we? Okay - you may continue...
"But there are just some people who are better with money than others and will wind up with a ton of money. There will be people who strike oil, who create new Internet toys. They fund symphonies and ballets and schools for inner city kids. They are a bulwark against tyranny because they can afford lawyers to fight overweening government.
We want for there to be a high number of rich people who function as a brake on government just as the nobles did on the crown in long ago England."
So, let's see if I've got this... "There is an immense amount of income inequality," "...some people will have more money than others," and "Some people are better with money than others and will wind up with a ton of money." Is that correct? Wow - is this a college research paper of some kind? These numbers and this evidence is awe-inspiring! Anything else, Mr. Stein?
"So I don't see why it's wrong to have income inequality. It isn't as if having a lot of rich people creates more poor people. We do not have a finite amount of money in America. There is an infinite amount and generally speaking, the more rich people there are who start businesses and or run them well, the more middle class people there are who work in them or hold stock in them."
Still a believer in trickle-down economics, eh? In theory, sure, that sounds like it could do some good. However, in actuality, that's another matter entirely. There's a reason why the income gap in this country is at a level not seen since the Great Depression - while wages have remained fairly stagnant for the middle- and lower-classes, the upper-class has seen a rather dramatic increase in their wealth. With rising prices in everything from food to healthcare to tickets to movies and concerts, that which the middle- and lower-classes could once afford they can no longer, all the while the upper-class is able to pay for such necessities and luxuries with greater ease than they could previously. So, while, no, having more rich people doesn't necessarily create more poor people, the conditions these rich people have left the middle- and lower-classes has resulted in more poor people. Anyway, back to the BS...
"So, I just don't see the problem in there being so many billionaires except for bare envy - an extremely basic emotion. It is an emotion that the politicians and academics and race haters have been able to stir up for a long, long time. It leads to jobs for Democrats but not much else."
Envy? Really? Does he really think those struggling to put food on the table for their families are really thinking, "Gee... If I were a billionaire, everything would be okay. I hate billionaires! I absolutely hate them! Ah!"? No - these families simply want to be able to live life from day to day and to provide all of life's essentials to their loved ones. What they basically want to do is survive. That's a far different cry than billionaires seeking to buy a third house, a second yacht, or a seventh car. It isn't that these lower- and middle-class individuals are envious of billionaires. It's that billionaires tend to lack empathy for the lower- and middle-classes. But, anyway, back to showing a strange amount of empathy for these very billionaires...
"But then we come to what is a real, genuine problem: poverty. It is not fine to have Americans (or Cubans or Congolese) in want, unable to afford the necessities in life. Again, I don't see why or where having a thin super rich slice affects that. But poverty is a real problem."
A thin super rich? What was this about income inequality? And poverty? How about reading the following from a CNBC report:
"The gulf between the richest 1 percent and the rest of America is the widest it's been since the Roaring '20s.
The very wealthiest Americans earned more than 19 percent of the country's household income last year - their biggest share since 1928, the year before the stock market crash. And the top 10 percent captured a record 48.2 percent of total earnings last year..."
and
"In 2012, the incomes of the top 1 percent rose nearly 20 percent compared with a 1 percent increase for the remaining 99 percent."
But, anyway, Mr. Stein, please go on...
"In olden times, poverty was the common human condition. In the USA, as recently as the Great Depression, poverty was commonplace. FDR might have exaggerated when he described one-third of the nation as 'ill housed, ill fed and ill clad...' But surely he was not far off.
Now, real poverty, where Americans lack cars or air conditioning (imagine that we now consider it poverty to lack something that was the ne plus ultra of luxury in my youth!) or solid food is extremely rare. Yes, the government designates many tens of millions as poor, but they almost always have indoor plumbing (which my mother did not have in her small town in the Catskills) and they are super nourished as opposed to mal-nourished. They get food stamps. They get free medical care. They get vouchers for many of the needs of life."
Times kind of change, Ben... ...and with regard to the claim that today's poor are "super nourished," do you consider a "healthy" dosage of McDonald's, Taco Bell, and other cheap fast food meals "super nourishing"? Want to know one reason why the obesity level is up in this country? Growing income inequality. With the increasing number of lower-class families, there has been an increasing need for cheap meals, and with those cheap fast food meals comes an increase in fat. Think that's just a myth (you know, like climate change, evolution, and gravity)? In college, I consumed a heavy dosage of fast food. What happened? I got up to 186 lbs. After I stopped eating fast food, I dropped to 150 lbs. It must have just been one of those strange coincidences... Anyway, you were saying, Mr. Monotone?
"This is not to deny their sorrow and I am sad for them. But why are they poor? Senator Elizabeth Warren, a genuine moron, not a fake one, says it's because of 'corporations.' What can that mean? Corporations are not vampires. They are aggregations of workers, owners, and customers. Senator Warren infamously noted that 'corporations don't cry,' but their workers do when government regulators shut them down for environmental infractions. Their stockholders do when mistaken federal policy causes their stock to crash so that old people cannot retire and young people cannot go to college. If you substituted the words 'groups of Americans' for 'corporations' I wonder how much applause and hatred you would whip up even at a DNC convention."
"Corporations are people, my friend..." Right... That's why when I asked a corporation to prom and didn't hear a response, I had to go alone... Anyway, back to the myth that corporations are people, Mr. Stein...
"Corporations have nothing to do with causing poverty and in fact well-run corporations like Berkshire-Hathaway generate immense income for their stockholders - largely pension funds and hospital and college endowments - that allow for ordinary people to have comfort and rest."
I wonder what Mr. Stein thinks about the following report which was just released:
"Foreign profits held overseas by U.S. corporations to avoid taxes at home nearly doubled from 2008 to 2013 to top $2.1 trillion..." Yet, it's the minority of food stamp fraudsters which we really need to worry about, right?
"What I have also observed is that government policy rarely causes poverty over the long run. Yes, Fed mistakes can cause recessions and good people are thrown out of work for a time. That unequivocally happens. But good people find new jobs or relocate. (Retraining is often, not always, a fraud.) And recessions end and we have severe labor shortages in some areas as we do now in the oil areas and Silicon Valley.
No, federal policy does not generally cause long-term unemployment and poverty. In general. Obviously, there are exceptions."
Obviously... Okay, I don't mean to seem agitated, but could we please close this up, Benjamin? Thanks...
"My humble observation is that most long-term poverty is caused by self-sabotage by individuals. Drug use. Drunkenness. Having children without a family structure. Gambling. Poor work habits. Disastrously unfortunate appearance. Above all, and counted in the preceding list, psychological problems (very much including basic laziness) cause people to be unemployed, have poor or no work habits, and enter and stray in poverty."
It's my humble observation that Ben Stein, like with many other things, is quite ignorant and prejudiced with regard to those in poverty...
"Impoverished people have personal problems. They may have had terrible childhoods. They may have been the victims of abuse. They are often the victims of their own abuse of drugs and alcohol. But they are not the victims of corporations or of the Federal Reserve. Their sad backgrounds lead them into self-destruction."
But, of course! The $2.1 trillion in taxes corporations avoided couldn't have aided the poor at all...
"Is there any public policy that can help them? We just don't know so far. But whipping up hate against the successful simply cannot do it. There is no connecting mechanism between envy and greater productivity. Quite the opposite. Envy legitimizes class hatred and idleness (see 'higher education - 2014') and produces nothing.
What will make the genuinely poor stop sabotaging themselves? Maybe, just maybe, if we let God back into the public forum it would help. I have seen spiritual solutions work miracles."
Yeah, that's going to do it. The poor will begin to prosper if they begin praying more to an invisible being. I have a better question for Ben Stein. What will make the genuinely rich stop sabotaging the poor? Maybe, just maybe, if we start passing laws to prevent this from happening with increasing frequency, maybe, just maybe, it would help those most in need...
http://spectator.org/articles/58633/poverty-and-income-inequality
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101025377
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/04/09/business/corporate-americas-offshore-cash-pile-rises-to-2-1-trillion-study/
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