By Chad Hill

Source: the Hipcrime Vocab

Have you heard? Inequality has been eliminated.

What? You didn’t know that? Well, certain “professional” economists have proved it is true.
You may wonder, when you drive around your town, why formerly occupied strip malls lie abandoned, and the only local businesses are Cash-For-Gold, Payday Loans, Dollar Stores, and tattoo parlours. You may ignore the people standing near freeway exits with signs begging for work or money (these have exploded where I live), or the people rolling around shopping carts with all their worldly possessions, or the people living in their cars. It’s all an illusion. Detroit? Chicago? Merely a mirage.

You may wonder at all the empty, shuttered factories, or the fact that the Wal-Mart Super Store is the town’s biggest employer, or that “help wanted” signs seem to appear only in the local Arby’s or Home Depot (or my favorite “owner operators wanted”). You may puzzle at the foreclosed homes stripped of copper and being overgrown with weeds that litter towns from coast to coast. The entire neighborhoods that lie empty and abanadoned? Another mirage, silly. The crumbling roads and local governments “tightening their belts?” Not happening.

Not happening. Nope, none of it.

You may have heard stories about people thirty or forty years ago with high-school educations being able to get jobs that supported families, allowed them to buy a house and save money. You may have heard about people able to save up enough to go to college by just working a summer job. You may have heard of people twenty or thirty years ago with full-time jobs that had benefits such as paid vacations and health care, which are now being stripped away job by job. You may have heard about something called a “union.”

False. All false. The world is getting more equal every day thanks to globalized corporate capitalism. The economists told me so.

You may even know people who have lost their job and are unable to find another one because employers discriminate against the unemployed. You may know someone with huge debt burdens because the cost to train workers is borne entirely by the workers themselves, and you have to go tens of thousands of dollars into debt just to get a job at all. Or you may know someone who was foreclosed upon, or drowning in debt due to an unforeseen circumstance or medical emergency. You might know people who’ve had to take jobs with much lower pay and benefits than the ones they had before. You may know people working brutally long hours, or denied extra work time so that they don’t qualify for health care benefits. You may know people who have used food stamps to feed themselves or their families, even though they work full time jobs. You may know older people who have to work because they can’t afford to retire.

They all deserve it. All of them. They’re all lazy. Laziness has exploded since 2008, don’t you know. Everyone gets exactly what they deserve. It’s never been  better time to be a worker under capitalism.

You may look on the outrageous fortunes spend by the rich and conclude that they are reaping more and more benefits by breaking wages and shipping jobs overseas. Don’t you believe it! Their riches are making everyone better off. Just look at Bill Gates! He gives money to poor people in Africa. And Steve Jobs. He invented the iPod in his basement, or something. Soaring CEO salaries are great. The bailouts were all paid back. And the soaring stock market prices will make everyone rich! Don’t worry about the costs for food, housing, education and transport. The “free market” will take care of it all and unleash abundance, but only if the “job creators” don’t have to pay taxes. Those trust fund kids getting unpaid internships and getting jobs downtown – that’s just a natural part of capitalism, it has nothing to do with inequality. The fact that entire cities are unaffordable for people making less than six figures? College and health care costs? Forget about it. Nothing to do with inequality, which, by the way, has been going down, not up. Besides, even if it were going up, inequality doesn’t matter, what matters is that life is getting better even for people even at the bottom. They love being in debt and working for minimum wage! And besides, the life for the average person is getting better and better the more riches the wealthy and powerful accumulate. After all we have smart phones. SMART PHONES!!!

All those people protesting around the world? They just don’t understand capitalism.

You may even have read books and articles asserting that we are a “winner-take-all” economy, a “servant economy,” or something like that. Not true! Those books and articles were all written by “leftists” and “liberals” who don’t understand science and statistics. Articles like this are just sensationalism by liberals who hate our freedom:

76% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck (CNN)

The Middle Class Is Steadily Eroding. Just Ask the Business Community (NYT)

The Financial Vulnerability of Americans (House of Debt)

Employment Down, Profits Up: The Aftermath of the Financial Crisis in 1 Graph (The Atlantic)

‘Happy Days’ no more: Middle-class families squeezed as expenses soar, wages stall (Wall Street Journal)

A Dozen Facts about America’s Struggling Lower-Middle-Class (Brookings)

America’s Sinking Middle Class (NYT)

Why So Little Media Coverage of How the Rich Are Becoming Richer and the Middle Class Wages are Being Squeezed? (Naked Capitalism)

RIP, the middle class: 1946-2013 (Salon)

Yep, Being a Young, American Adult Is a Financial Nightmare (The Atlantic)

Ripping Off Young America: The College-Loan Scandal (Rolling Stone)

Median CEO Pay Just Topped $10M for the First Time (Slate)

Upgrade or Die (George Packer)

San Francisco’s Income Inequality Rivals that of Developing Nations (Vanity Fair)

Gap Between Rich And Poor In Manhattan “Rivals Sub-Saharan Africa” (Gothamist)

How did the economists come to this conclusion, you ask? Well, Piketty made a few spreadsheet errors. And thanks to that, the professional economist caste can breathe a sigh of relief that all of the things I named above don’t exist, and happily go back to their blackboards and spreadsheets in their corporate-funded free-market think-tank cubicles and university offices.

Because inequality is entirely dependent upon r being greater than g. That is, the rate of return to capital (yes, let’s just argue about what constitutes “capital,” that will make this whole thing go away), must be greater than g, the rate of growth of the economy. Because, heaven knows, it’s not like workers could ever get paid less than the growth of the economy, right?

Right?

Read the full article here: http://hipcrime.blogspot.com/2014/06/inequality-has-been-eliminated.html