The Best and The Brightest

Originally, I was going to link you to an article from the Rolling Stone on Bloomberg's comment that Congress created the financial crisis. But that was almost a week ago now, and I wanted to give you something about the growing inequality debate. 

So recently the CBO released a report detailing the recent rise in inequality. It pointed out that between 1979 and 2007 the income of the top 1 percent of households rose 275 percent, while the income of the bottom 20 percent rose by only 18 percent. You would think the natural reaction these numbers would be "Wow, the wealth of our society is going disproportionately to the wealthiest Americans. We have a problem with economic inequality in our country." But alas, the response of many on the right was to try and obfuscate the situation. Most egregiously, a writer for the American Enterprise Institute simply called income inequality a myth. Other conservative writers tried to make it out to be a problem between college grads and non-college grads (it's not). 

That brings me to the piece I want to show you. It's by Ross Douthat, who I'm really not a fan of. His piece doesn't directly address the issue of inequality, which is one reason it caught my eye. He seems deny the issue of inequality without even mentioning it explicitly, writing at one point of our "meritocratic era," as if the CBO piece didn't tell us anything. The two redeeming aspects of this piece in my mind are 1. an implicit reference to "The Best and the Brightest" by David Halberstam, and 2. the acknowledgment that Bachmann and Cain are ignorant and incompetent. Enjoy.