A stand for the abused 1%

Serious article addressing the absurd notion that all the social problems can be solved by taxing the richest 1%

A few quotes:
"It is amazing how the “one percent” epithet, a reference to the top 1% of earners, has caught on in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world. In the United States, this 1% includes all those with a 2006 household income of at least $386,000. In the popular narrative, the 1% is thickly populated with unscrupulous corporate titans, greedy bankers, and insider-trading hedge-fund managers. Reading some progressive economists, it might seem that the answer to all of America’s current problems is to tax the 1% and redistribute to everyone else."

Inconvenient truth:
"But what might be the most important overlooked fact is that the rise in income inequality is not just at the very top, though it is most pronounced there. Academic studies suggest that the top tenth percentile of income distribution in the US, and elsewhere, is also moving farther away from the median earner. This is an inconvenient fact for the progressive economist. “We are the 90%,” sounds less dramatic than “we are the 99%.” And, for some of the protesters, it may not even be true."
Before dismissing this paragraph, please check the statistics  - you might well turn out to be among the 10% of the highest earners in your country, particularly, if you have an advanced university degree.

Social mobility and the value of education:
"Perhaps most problematic, though, is that something other than plutocrat-friendly policies is largely responsible for the growing inequality. That something is education and skills. True, not every degree is a passport to a job. Freshly-minted degree holders, especially from lower-quality programs, are finding it particularly hard to get a job nowadays, because they are competing with experienced workers who are also jobless. Nevertheless, the unemployment rate for those with degrees is one-third the unemployment rate for those without a high school diploma.

Close examination suggests that the single biggest difference between those at or above the top tenth percentile of the income distribution and those below the 50th percentile is that the former have a degree or two while the latter, typically, do not. Technological change and global competition have made it impossible for American workers to get good jobs without strong skills. As Harvard professors Claudia Golden and Larry Katz put it, in the race between technology and education, education is falling behind."

The real problem:
"To acknowledge the fact that the broken educational and skills-building system is responsible for much of the growing inequality that ordinary people experience would, however, detract from the larger populist agenda of rallying the masses against the very rich. It has the inconvenient implication that the poor have a role in pulling themselves out of the morass. There are no easy and quick fixes to education – every US president since Gerald Ford in the mid-1970’s has called for educational reforms, with little effect. In contrast, blaming the undeserving 1% offers a redistributive policy agenda with immediate effects."