David Brooks Tells Us Not To Focus On The Rise in Inequality.

David Brooks has discovered a new twist to deflect the growing attention away from the top 1% which has collected the lion's share of income and wealth over the last 30 years, and has also been the largest beneficiary of tax cuts. This concentration of income and wealth has also increased their political power. This has led many Americans to lose faith in our democratic system. David Brooks believes that we should instead focus our attention on the inequality that exists between better off Americans with a college education and less well off Americans who may not even have a high school degree. We should be more concerned about increasing the social mobility of the less well off than we are about rising inequality and the corruption of democracy.

We should, of course, be concerned about social mobility as well as we are about the concentration of income, wealth and power that is fracturing our fragile democracy. One of the problems is that the top 1% has the ability to focus government resources on their problems at the expense of programs that might improve the quality of life for the less well off. The attacks that we are witnessing on Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and public education are not coming from ordinary Americans who may have attained a college degree but are now worried about finding or keeping better paying jobs. They are being funded by a radical element within the top 1% who use their resources to influence public opinion and government policy. David Brooks does a good job on their behalf. He has a talent for deflecting attention from things that matter to things that are less important. He is also well schooled, and more sophisticated in his approach than most who defend the interests of the top 1%.