But still, it seems many Americans (and economists) feel the income disparity is in a serious a state, and needs to be fixed one way or another. The disagreement seems to be about how that should be achieved.

One thing I find interesting is that American liberals are not “ichimai-iwa” on this. Take free trade, for example. Many columnists at WaPo or NYT are against protectionism, while you see Obama and Clinton leaned towards protectionism…

Perhaps it’s counterintuitive because everyone focuses on image rather than reality.

BTW, one factor dragging down the recent American income numbers, and probably the Swedes too, is non-skilled immigrants. A lot of Muslim immigration to Sweden in the past few years.

With Japan, I think it’s over-regulated to a degree that it kills itself.

BTW, if figures say African-Americans are “richer” than Swedes, that’s so counterintuitive I’d have to doubt that figure. You honestly believe so?

2. This is not a WSJ opinion. It’s a column—and a rather poorly written and conceived one at that—by their house left-winger, Thomas Frank. (He would probably call himself progressive.) Frank is more at home in The Nation, for whom he also has written.

3. Frank is known for his book, “What’s The Matter With Kansas”, in which he complains that American hicks are too stupid to know what’s in their best self-interest, which is to vote for left-wing Democrats like all the intelligent people from New York City.

4. He says:

Mr. Greenhouse reveals how managers extract unpaid work through an array of ingenious tricks, from eliminating bathroom breaks to electronically erasing hours from workers’ records.

The plural of “anecdote” is not “data”.

5.

The top 20% of households earned more, after taxes, than the rest of the country combined in 2005, while the topmost 1% of the population took home more than the bottom 40%.

The topmost 1% of the population also accounts for about 28% of all federal taxes, and about 39% of federal income taxes, the highest since 1979 and higher than Clinton’s last year in office.

The bottom 50% of Americans by income pay 3% of all federal income taxes.

Also:

The top-earning 25 percent of taxpayers (AGI over $62,068) earned 67.5 percent of the nation’s income, but they paid more than four out of every five dollars collected by the federal income tax (86 percent). The top 1 percent of taxpayers (AGI over $364,657) earned approximately 21.2 percent of the nation’s income (as defined by AGI), yet paid 39.4 percent of all federal income taxes. That means the top 1 percent of tax returns paid about the same amount of federal individual income taxes as the bottom 95 percent of tax returns.

As for how much some people earn compared to others: So what?

Does Mr. Frank have some kind of infallible standard that he uses to judge how much people should make?

6.

It is, in other words, a political disaster, with tax cuts, trade agreements, deregulatory measures, and enforcement decisions all finely crafted to benefit one part of society and leave the rest behind. Few of the voters who gave Ronald Reagan his landslide victories, it is fair to say, intended for this to be the outcome.

Does Mr. Frank actually believe that Americans would be better off economically if Jimmy Carter had been reelected, or Mondale elected in a second term?

8.

What kind of country are we to be? A land of equality?

We have empirical evidence of what happens when governments insist on equality of economic results. People tore down the Berlin Wall with their bare hands.

Socialism is to prosperity as pantyhose are to sex.

9.

Or a bankers’ utopia – where the law of the land has achieved mystical oneness with the higher law of classical economics, and devil take the bottom 80%.

Note the comment: “mystical oneness with the higher law of classical economics”.

Others have noticed that he’s a smartass too:

The following is a typical Frank sentence: “The most powerful symbolic weapon in the arsenal of market populism was the astonishing new information technology of the decade, to which all manner of cosmic significance could be attributed and from which no end of lessons could be drawn.”

Note the snigger, the distancing, the mock exaggeration, the proof that the speaker is not a fool. If you like sentences like that, you’ll like this book. But if you like carefully considered critique of today’s culture, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

10. The bottom 80%? Most of the world would love to live like the bottom 80% of Americans. African-Americans have a higher PPP-adjusted GDP per capita than do Swedes. (This originally from a Swedish research institute.)

Also:

…a study by a Swedish research organization, Timbro, … compared the gross domestic products of the 15 European Union members (before the 2004 expansion) with those of the 50 American states and the District of Columbia…. the study found (that) if the E.U. was treated as a single American state, it would rank fifth from the bottom, topping only Arkansas, Montana, West Virginia and Mississippi.

Frank’s column in the WSJ is just breakfast table entertainment for the “plutocrats”, as he calls them. You know–all the people who look like the old bald guy in the top hat in the Monopoly game.

For hard-core conservatives out there, here’s an interesting opinion on WSJ I’d like to share. If the link below doesn’t work, search for the “Our Great Economic U-Turn” on the net:

http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB121072656227790335.html

The closing sentence I kind of like:

So let us have one now. Instead of pleasant talk about “change” and feats of beer drinking at the corner tavern, let us hear our candidates address this greatest issue of them all: What kind of country are we to be? A land of equality? Or a bankers’ utopia – where the law of the land has achieved mystical oneness with the higher law of classical economics, and devil take the bottom 80%.

Also, people like to claim that uninsured people wait until the last minute and then go to the ER, but they never actually provide evidence for this. Just because you think it’s obvious doesn’t mean it is.

It’d help if people could pump their own gas in Japan too.

However, raising the retirement age is not as silly as it sounds. With people staying healthy into old age, thanks to modern medicine, retiring at 60 or 65 means you still have a couple of active decades ahead of you. Maybe they can’t do as much physical activity as a 20 or 30 year old, but there are many fields they can be active in. As for geriatrics filling my tank or making my burgers, they’re not done by people about 60 as it is, so why would that change? All I am suggesting is about another ten years.

U.S.:
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/2/38980580.pdf

Japan:
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/45/51/38979974.pdf

BTW, I don’t think preventive care is working in the U.S. For example, it’s pretty obvious Americans are more obese than other nationals. Because of the high cost involved, many people aren’t insured at all and wait until the last minute when ER is the only option. I believe one of the major reasons Americans are filing for bankruptcy is health costs. I hope denying universal health care won’t lead to this:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/avoiding-moral-hazard/

second: There are sooooooooooo many issues with the japanese medical system. The hospitals will bed a old lady for two weeks just because she has a cold. Why? Because the system will pay for it. But if a high school girl tears her ACL (most are required to join a sport or social club) the doctors will say “Oh you can live without an ACL”. Later on in life she has arthritic issues and the hospital makes more money. Bottom line here is that the doctors here could give a shit less about preventive care, they want you coming back.
In the US preventive care is all the rage these days because the insurance companies figured out that if they keep you healthy you will spend less of their money seeing doctors. People whine that US healthcare is way too expensive but the best doctors on the planet are educated in the US. Capitalism does have a few benefits, competition forces people to innovate.