December 10, 2016
Paul Krugman told readers that intellectual types like him tend to vote for progressive taxes and other measures that benefit white working class people. This is only partly true.
People with college and advanced degrees tend to be strong supporters of recent trade deals [I’m including China’s entry to the WTO] that have been a major factor in the loss of manufacturing jobs in the last quarter century, putting downward pressure on the pay of workers without college degrees. They also tend to support stronger and longer patent and copyright protections (partly in trade deals), which also redistribute income upward. (We will pay $430 billion for prescription drugs this year, which would cost 10 to 20 percent of this amount in a free market. The difference is equal to roughly five times annual spending on food stamps.)
Educated people also tended to support the deregulation of the financial sector, which has led to some of the largest fortunes in the country. They also overwhelmingly supported the 2008 bailout which threw a lifeline to the Wall Street banks at a time when the market was going to condemn them to the dustbin of history. (Sorry, the second Great Depression story as the alternative is nonsense — that would have required a decade of stupid policy, nothing about the financial collapse itself would have entailed a second Great Depression.)
His crew has also been at best lukewarm on defending unions. However, they don’t seem to like free trade in professional services that would, for example, allow more foreign doctors to practice in the United States, bringing their pay in line with doctors in Europe and Canada. The lower pay for doctors alone could save us close to $100 billion a year in health care expenses.
None of this means that the plutocrats standing alongside Trump are somehow better for working class people. They have made it pretty clear that they intend to use his presidency to take everything they can from the rest of the country. But Krugman is engaging in some serious fanciful thinking if he thinks that intellectual types have in general been acting in the interests of the working class. (And, I suspect many do ridicule the behavior and lifestyles of the working class.)
Yes, all of this is talked about in my new book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Have Been Structured to Make the Rich Richer (it’s free).
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