Rich

2) CLAIM: “Rich people work harder, they deserve what they’ve earned!”

Example: David Brooks:

For the first time in human history, the rich work longer hours than the proletariat.

Today’s super-wealthy no longer go off on four-month grand tours of Europe, play gin-soaked Gatsbyesque croquet tournaments or spend hours doing needlepoint while thinking in full paragraphs like the heroines of Jane Austen novels. Instead, their lives are marked by sleep deprivation and conference calls, and their idea of leisure is jetting off to Aspen to hear Zbigniew Brzezinski lead panels titled ”Beyond Unipolarity.” Meanwhile, down the income ladder, the percentage of middle-age men who have dropped out of the labor force has doubled over the past 40 years, to over 12 percent.

HOW TO RESPOND: Really? Jamie Dimon works harder than a single mom with two jobs trying to make ends meet? Gar Alperovitz argues that, in reality, the wealthy live off luck, not skill. As Bruce Bartlett, a former conservative, notes, “Only 61.8 percent of national income went to compensation of employees in 2012, compared with 65.1 percent in 2001.” Middle- and lower-class blue-collar workers are actually creating more, but getting less. While productivity has steadily increased by a total of 85 percent between 1979 and 2012, the inflation adjusted wage of the median worker rose by a paltry 6 percent and the value of the federal minimum wage fell by 21 percent. Richard Branson has said, “Yes, entrepreneurs may work hard, but I don’t think they actually work any harder than, say, doctors, nurses or other people in society …” The idea the right promotes is that poor people are lazy, rather than smart, hardworking people who never get a fair shake. Worse, they say that they are “dependent” on government, when it’s really the rich and their cronies who rely on public financing. The middle class that decries poor “welfare queens” is more and more reliant on government largess. Gore Vidal observed that the American free market system is “capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich.”