promoting his new book Economic Facts and Fallacies
Interview at RightWingNews:
Oh my, it’s so simple that it’s hard to explain. If you take some fixed amount of income and you say that people between these two sets of income, we’ll call that the middle-class. Fine.
But, what happens over time is that the average income in the country increases and so the whole distribution of income moves to the right and now there are fewer people in those fixed brackets. Of course, what that really means is that the middle-class is having a higher income.
This is how people create hysteria, saying the middle-class is vanishing and there will be nobody but the few rich and the masses of the poor, etc, etc. Once people, particularly on the Left, find something that fits their preconceptions, they grab it and run with it. They don’t investigate any further.
Lots of other links here:
People] love to say things like, “They thought the Irish and the Jews were unassimilable but look at them now, etc.” Well, the circumstances of the Irish and the Jews were radically different from the circumstances of the people who are coming here from Central America.
First of all, the times were different. First of all, the Irish, the Jews and blacks as well, who were moving out of the South, had leaders and organizations that were doing their damnedest to get them assimilated to the norms and the society to which they were moving.
Today, you have just the direct opposite. You not only have groups within in these societies that are trying to keep them unassimilable and full of resentment. But you also have people from outside the group, including politicians but also ideologues and intellectuals, who say one culture is as good as another and why should we expect them to assimilate to our culture. Well, that’s wonderful. You should try to go to China and live without speaking Chinese.
