The One Dead Giveaway That Somebody Is Absolutely Clueless About Economics

The comedian Bill Engvall, who announced he’s retiring from comedy this year, made a career by saying that stupid people “should have to wear signs that just say, ‘I’m stupid.’ That way you wouldn’t rely on them.”

In the complicated world of economics, there is a similar sign you can look for that will instantly tell you the author has no idea what he or she is talking about. It’s a simple turn of phrase which, once you’ve seen it, you’ll never be able to unsee; you will always know the author has no comprehension of his chosen topic.

Here are a few examples. Let’s see if you can find the common thread:

During a debate in 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said that Democrats “have to have an agenda that brings our people together so that the wealth and income doesn’t just go to the people on top but to all of us”;Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) tweeted in 2018, “There are enough gains in this country for us all to live well. The problem is when 86% of wealth goes to the top 1% of people”;NPR reported in 2019, “The top 20 percent of households received more than half of all income”;The Associated Press reported that, while household wealth “jumped 80% in the past decade[, m]ore than one-third of that gain — $16.2 trillion in riches — went to the wealthiest 1%, figures from the Federal Reserve show. Just 25% of it went to middle-to-upper-middle class households”;In 2018, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a story titled, “Massive wealth flowing to relatively small number of individuals, businesses”;The Washington Post reported earlier this week, “The top five billionaires saw their wealth increase 82 percent since the pandemic began, adding $370 billion since theS&P 500′s pre-pandemic peak in February 2020, according to calculations based on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index”; andIn March, Bloomberg News told its readers: “The richest 1% of households saw their net worth rise by some $4 trillion in 2020, meaning that they captured about 35% of the extra wealth generated nationwide … The poorest half of the population, by contrast, got about 4% of overall gains.”

Blaming immigrants for lack of prosperity is a tired – and incorrect – argument.

There are enough gains in this country for us all to live well. The problem is when 86% of wealth goes to the top 1% of people.

In a world without immigrants, we would be in even greater crisis.

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