Madoff and Mankiw and Inequality–the corporatist ideology at work

by Linda Beale

  Madoff and Mankiw and Inequality–the corporatist ideology at work

There are two letters to the editor in the Times today that are worth noting–as usual, the ‘real’ analysis is hidden in the interior pages, positioned next to a huge ad (for an investment adviser, no less).
Chris Cannon from San Francisco notes that treating Madoff as the iconic symbol of the financial disruption caused by the credit bubble is problematic.

“Everyone agrees that Mr. Madoff broke the rules.  But the damage done by those acting as allowed by our ineffective rules cost the public much more.  ‘Our troubled financial times’ are the product of a bubble economy fueled by cheap money, an abject failure by rating agencies, regulatory agencies that have been hamstrung by regulations written by financial lobbyists, and a laserlike focus by some bank leaders on yearly bonuses.”  Letters, New York Times, Dec. 18, 2011, at BU 7.

Steven Conn, Yellow Springs Ohio, notes that Greg Mankiw (economic adviser to Republicans, and specifically to Mitt Romney) misses the boat on understanding the way that economics is burdened with ideology.

“He seems not to understand that economists aren’t really objective and dispassionate scientists.  Economics is merely a set of tools with which we build the kind of society we want to live in.  Defining what that means is, of course, an ideological proposition, and thus all economic ‘theory’ is freighted with ideological baggage.”  Letters, New York Times, Dec. 18, 2011, at BU 7.

These two ideas are related.

 One of the reasons that someone like Madoff could get away with a long-term, enormous economic scam is that the reigning economic ideology from 1980 to 2010 has been the neoliberal belief in unfettered markets, taking power with ‘reaganomics’ and the acceptance of ‘greed is good’ corporatism that took hold in 1980, in which those that are sleazy, fraudulent or just intent on having things work out a certain way can take enormous means to achieve their petty ends–like hiring just-out-of-Congress people to panhandle for them in the halls of Congress and to hobnob with regulators, drafting the rules that govern the industry.  It is the enormous expansion of this corporatist perspective that permits money to buy the rules that caused the financial crisis and that continues to pervade the policy solutions that can get through a Congress that is behoven to lobbyists and Big Money in various industries.
As long as we leave tax policy fundamentally to the corporatist moneybags and ideological economists, we can expect regulations to fall short of what they ought to do to protect ordinary Americans; corporations to make money out of failing to do what they ought to do to protect their workers, their customers, and their communities; tax laws that fail to exact a reasonable share of the fiscal burden from the very wealthy (such as the current trend towards decimation of the estate tax, often the only way that some extraordinarily wealthy families pay much of anything, because most of their income is in the favored form of capital gains and income on capital); and the passage of stupid laws that take away our most precious Constitutional rights–like the legislation under consideration that will permit the MILITARY TO DETAIN US CITIZENS WITHOUT DUE PROCESS.
And the result of these tax and economic policies will be a continuation of the trend towards a two-class society of the very rich and the rest of us that has been aided and abetted by reaganomics.  See Allegretto, the few, the proud, and the very rich, Berkeley Blog, Dec. 2011.

The share of wealth held by the top fifth is about 87.2 percent while the bottom four-fifths share the remaining 12.8 percent of wealth—so the Occupiers are correct in their assessment. And, the riches of those in the top 1 percent are about 225 times greater than that held by the typical family—it was 125 times in 1962—so, Grandma was correct too.
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In 2007 (the most recent SCF) the cumulative wealth of the Forbes 400 was $1.54 trillion or roughly the same amount of wealth held by the entire bottom fifty percent of American families….Upon closer inspection, the Forbes list reveals that six Waltons—all children (one daughter-in-law) of Sam or James “Bud” Walton the founders of Wal-Mart—were on the list. The combined worth of the Walton six was $69.7 billion in 2007—which equated to the total wealth of the entire bottom thirty percent!  Id.

originally published at http://ataxingmatter.blogs.com/tax/2011/12/madoff-and-mankiw-.html