KRUGMAN: The INVISIBLE Super Rich---Americans have no idea just how unequal our society has become.
Americans have no idea how much the Masters of the Universe are paid, a finding very much in line with evidence that Americans vastly underestimate the concentration of wealth at the top.
http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20ariely%20in%20press.pdf
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...........the truly rich are so removed from ordinary people’s lives that we never see what they have. We may notice, and feel aggrieved about, college kids driving luxury cars; but we don’t see private equity managers commuting by helicopter to their immense mansions in the Hamptons. The commanding heights of our economy are invisible because they’re lost in the clouds.
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Does the invisibility of the very rich matter? Politically, it matters a lot. Pundits sometimes wonder why American voters don’t care more about inequality; part of the answer is that they don’t realize how extreme it is. And defenders of the superrich take advantage of that ignorance. When the Heritage Foundation tells us that the top 10 percent of filers are cruelly burdened, because they pay 68 percent of income taxes, it’s hoping that you won’t notice that word “income” — other taxes, such as the payroll tax, are far less progressive. But it’s also hoping you don’t know that the top 10 percent receive almost half of all income and own 75 percent of the nation’s wealth, which makes their burden seem a lot less disproportionate.
Most Americans say, if asked, that inequality is too high and something should be done about it — there is overwhelming support for higher minimum wages, and a majority favors higher taxes at the top. But at least so far confronting extreme inequality hasn’t been an election-winning issue. Maybe that would be true even if Americans knew the facts about our new Gilded Age. But we don’t know that. Today’s political balance rests on a foundation of ignorance, in which the public has no idea what our society is really like.
The Rest:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/opinion/paul-krugman-our-invisible-rich.html?_r=0
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When even the middle class have been forced out of their homes due to premature and long-lasting unemployment, and the minimum wage workers can't get to work and starve to death, the wealthy are going to start having some significant problems.
How they can be so short-sighted as not to see that is the real question. They consider themselves so smart, but the consequences of their failing economic policies, their inability to adhere to the same laws as the rest of us, and their acting as if they deserve their lot, will be as catastrophic to the wealthy as they are already to the rest of us.
Their money won't save them because there won't be enough skilled workers around to keep them propped up. They'll have to fall back on their own "skills" and they will find those skills atrophied, non-existent, or irrelevant.
I've always wondered why entertainers are paid so disproportionately in the US, it must be to distract the masses and keep us ignorant.
How did the oligarchs ever let the internet escape? That will prove to be a big mistake 
Via the FT, a new study compares perceptions of inequality across advanced nations. The big takeaway here is that Americans are more likely than Europeans to believe that they live in a middle-class society, even though income is really much less equally distributed here than in Europe. I’ve truncated the table to show the comparison between the U.S. and France: the French think they live in a hierarchical pyramid when they are in reality mostly middle-class, Americans are the opposite.
As the paper says, other evidence also says that Americans vastly underestimate inequality in their own society – and when asked to choose an ideal wealth distribution, say that they like Sweden.
Why the difference? American exceptionalism when it comes to income distribution – our unique suspicion of and hostility to social insurance and anti-poverty programs – is, I and many others would argue, very much tied to our racial history. This does not, however, explain in any direct way why we should misperceive real inequality: people could oppose aid to Those People while understanding how rich the rich are. There may, however, be an indirect effect, because the racial divide empowers right-wing groups of all kinds, which in turn issue a lot of propaganda dismissing and minimizing inequality.
Interesting stuff.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/inequality-delusions/
Americans choose a Sweden style ideal wealth distribution but won't choose the policies - high/progressive taxes, strong safety net, empowered unions - that Sweden uses to accomplish their enviable wealth distribution.
