So here's the cold, hard, unvarnished economic truth about financial deregulation, and the big gaps between rich and poor it fosters: They're really, really lousy for the economy, as Robert S. McElvaine points out in "It's the Equality, Stupid" in this month's Sojourners magazine.
The big lie for the last few decades has been the endlessly-repeated claim that only when government gets out of the way of Wall Street can rich people do their magic of "creating jobs" and keeping the economy humming. If some jobs have to get sent overseas in a "race to the bottom," federal labor law has to go virtually unenforced, and some CEOs who move factories out of the U.S. have to make more money than all 10,000 of their Mexican maquiladora workers put together -- that's just the price we're told we have to pay for the greater good.
Now, though, it's become clear that -- just as before the Great Depression –- extraordinarily rich people tend to put their money into bubble-prone speculations, which pop with disastrous force. Poor and middle-class people, in contrast, spend their money on food, clothing, and other consumer goods, which, it turns out, is what keeps the economy humming.
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