If you want to know had badly Keynesian central banking has corrupted the financial discourse, just check into the current PC sensation of the week.
We are referring to Ray Dalio’s punking of the very capitalism under which his $160 billion hedge funds has become the largest in the world and his net worth has soared to a tidy $18 billion. Yet Sunday night he told millions of “60 Minutes” viewers that the American Dream is dead, capitalism is in desperate need of reform and that wealth, income and opportunity maldistribution in the US is so severe that the President should call an national emergency.
(We hear you, Ray, but please don’t encourage the Donald to declare any more national emergencies – the Mexican border one is stupid enough).
In any event, Dalio was just getting started, reprising on bubblevision itself this morning with further heaping loads of admonishment about why the system isn’t working anymore, and that among other things he and people like him need to be taxed good and hard.
OK, Ray, the Dems will send you a pretty hefty due bill in the spring of 2021 after they sweep the tables in the next election. But for crying out loud, can’t you explain why America has gone into reverse Robin Hood without resorting to the utterly incoherent babble you dispensed on CNBC this AM?
After all, if the Billionaires Club is to be visited upon by a condign punishment of its own urging, the indictment ought to at least make sense, which Dalio’s 25 minutes of bloviation absolutely did not. For want of doubt, his gibberish is all right here in the attached link.
We might ordinarily be inclined to spare Dalio the embarrassment of this amazingly stupid clip, but the thing that needs be established is that not once did he mention the front, center and overwhelming cause of the baleful condition he rightly identifies.
To wit, wealth distribution in modern America started to go to hell in a hand basket about 1987, which is to say, the exact time in which Bubbles Alan Greenspan took over the Fed and discovered the printing press in the basement of the Eccles Building during the 22% market meltdown of October 19, 1987.
Therefore, if the top 1% went from a 34% share of the national wealth to 40% during the last three decades while the bottom 90% went from a roughly equivalent share (33%) down to just half of the slice (21%) going to the super wealthy, it should at least be conceded that the essence of capitalism did not change during that interval. Nor did Ronald Reagan’s so-called trickle down tax cut policy skew even more to the rich.
In fact, the low water mark on the top marginal tax rate was the 28% level embedded in the 1986 tax reform act, which rose steadily thereafter to an effective rate of 42% by December 2017.
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