Yves here. While this post contains a lot of persuasive anecdata, as in Thom Hartmann pointing out many cases where dire poverty did not lead to crimes against property, his focus on inequality as the main driver, while persuasive, is still a tad simplistic.
First, Hartmann ignores addicts, which in America exist at all levels of income, even if more prevalent among the poor. Junkies will famously do anything to get their next fix.
Second, and more important, Hartmann apparently does not consider white collar crime to be crime. What is his theory of SBF, who came from an extremely privileged background and had snagged a job at a hedge fund, as in he was on track to be comfortably rich? Or the Sacklers, who were wealthy enough to give a building to Harvard in the 1970s? Why was their already mighty affluent status not good enough? Or partners at McKinsey who seem to think anything goes as long as it generates more fees? Walking a bit down memory lane, what about Enron and the many early 2000s big companies like Worldcom whose executives were found guilty of securities fraud?
By Thom Hartmann , a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of Neoliberalism and more than 30+ other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Instituteand his writings are archived at hartmannreport.com. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
In the midst of all of his trials, in a moment pregnant with irony, Donald Trump recently claimed that if he was reelected he would seize direct control of Washington, DC because, he said, crime there was out of control.
“We’re going to federalize it,” Trump told attendees to a Las Vegas rally. “We’re gonna have the toughest law enforcement in the country. We’re not going to have any more crime and it’s going to look beautiful.”
As usual, Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Most people think crime (particularly property crime) is caused by poverty, like the poor people portrayed in Les Misérables stealing food for their children. But Louis XVI’s policies created poverty in France while massively increasing his own wealth and that of his friends.
(Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, himself born into poverty, accusedthe French king of “crimes and extravagancies” that led to the French Revolution in a response to George Washington’s question of his cabinet about whether America should remain neutral in the conflict.)
Yes, the French poor were poor, but during that time the rich got vastly richer. There was poverty, and even periodic famines in France, but (outside of stealing food) that wasn’t what was driving crime and ultimately the 18th century French revolution: it was inequality.
Hold that thought. Because our entire popular understanding of the cause of much crime—enough to “tipping point” a society into crisis—is usually wrong.
I’ve seen this dynamic at work in multiple countries, often among very, very poor people and even in the midst of famines.
In late November 1980 I went into Uganda at the tail end of the Tanzanian invasion that overthrew Idi Amin. As Amin fled to Saudi Arabia where he was feted with a palace for himself and his wives by the Saudi government, his soldiers went on a killing and looting rampage, particularly in the northern region against the Karamojong people.
In one large region, they killed most all the men and boys older than toddlers and raped the women; by the time we got there the region was filled with thousands of starving women and babies (my contemporaneous diary of that trip is here). Skeletal adults and big-bellied children moaned in pain from starvation as they died before our eyes.
Thursday of that week the special on NPR’s All Things Considered show was an 18-minute conversation between Sanford Ungar and me (on a satellite phone from Uganda) as I was describing the famine we were trying to address, with hundreds of people dying every day, live on the radio as Americans were sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner.
And yet, in the midst of all that, there was no crime; people formed community.
I worked in Bogota, Colombia a year or so later in one of that city’s massive barrios built on hillsides out of cardboard and scrap wood with streams of raw sewage running to an open sewer in the valley below. I worked in the Klong Toey slum of Bangkok where the Duang Prateep Foundation was putting in non-flammable sidewalks and organizing regular trash removal because the giant Japanese corporation that owned the swamp the slum was built over kept hiring local organized crime families to burn out and kill the slum-dwellers.
When I was in The Philippines in 1985, Father Ben Carreon, an activist priest and the author of a popular column for the Manila Times, took me to one of that city’s massive garbage dumps. The smell was awful, the air thick with insects, as mountains of rotted garbage stretched off into the distance.
We stood in the hot afternoon sun, and Father Ben said, “Look carefully at the piles of garbage.” I squinted in the bright light, looking at the distant piles, and noticed something. “They’re moving!” I said. “No, it’s children on them that are moving,” he said. “Thousands of them. Their families live all around here, and the children spend their days scavenging for garbage that their families can sell or eat.”
People in Uganda were dying of famine in Mbale and across the Karamoja region, and hunger stalked the “big city” of Kampala, but there was little crime because the rich people had all left the country. Instead, there was a shared sense of solidarity; while poor people did prey on each other, it was more the exception than the rule and entire communities would rise up against thieves.
I found the same thing working in the slums of Thailand, Peru, India, Colombia, South Sudan and other countries; the biggest crime I personally experienced was having my wallet and pocket computer stolen on a flight from South Sudan to Kenya while I was asleep. Truly poor people don’t buy airplane tickets.
Poverty doesn’t cause the societal disintegration that leads to most crime, it turns out: inequality does. And America is now, far and away, the most unequal developed country in the entire world.
While billionaires who pay less in federal income tax rates than you do blast themselves into space on giant penis-shaped rockets, the majority of Americans are struggling to get by. I say “the majority” because a decade ago the number of Americans who could call themselves “middle class” slipped below 50 percent for the first time since the Eisenhower era.
Last November, I mentioned that we’d experienced an attempted break-in. Our neighborhood’s burglar wasn’t hungry; she was young, healthy, and well-fed, as was the small dog she walked to blend into the community. America is not experiencing a surge of crimes related to starvation-level survival, even among our homeless communities.
So how does inequality provoke criminality? The research on the topic is pretty exhaustive, albeit poorly publicized, and the simplest explanation is among the most easily understood: humans are wired to rebel against unfairness. Unfairness thus destroys social trust.
Walk into a preschool class and give one child a pile of cookies while giving everybody else only one each and see what happens. In fact, it’s not just humans; this holds true across all mammalian species from rats to dogs to apes.
As research across 33 nations published in Oxford’s European Journal of Public Health found, inequality devastates social trust among people, opening the door to antisocial crime, including violent crime (although you could argue that stealing is also a form of interpersonal violence provoked by inequality).
We’re social animals and evolution has fine-tuned that socialization instinct—necessary for survival in a hostile world—so well that in virtually ever pre-literate and/or pre-agricultural society in the world (and there are still many left) the number one way to gain status in most such societies is to give things away.
In North America, that’s the origin of the Native America Potlatch, a feast where everybody brings food and shares as much as they can. (The first Thanksgiving of lore was probably an east-coast variation on the Potlatch.)
In fact, as I learned in Uganda working through that famine, the more people have their backs to the wall, the more they become cooperative and concerned with each other. Look at the people making it through the many climate-driven natural disasters we’re experiencing these days: community forming and re-forming, rather than looting, is the norm.
Shared hardship—even collectively facing death—fosters community. Read the stories from Holocaust survivors or listen to the stories coming out of Ukraine today.
This isn’t to romanticize poverty; it’s tough, and crime is a problem in barrios and slums around the world. But crime isn’t sweeping the cities of Europe, Japan, South Korea or Taiwan the way it is American cities because in those countries the very wealthy are appropriately taxed and therefore average people are still well within the parameters of the middle class.
Their social contract is largely intact. (There are exceptions, and they produce a criminal political class—fascists—as we’re seeing right now in Sweden and Italy in response to those countries taking in more refugees than they can reasonably assimilate, but that’s a separate argument for another day.)
Research published in the Oxford Economic Papers found that not only does inequality cause increases in crime (including violent crime), but the main variable is people’s perception of inequality: When the morbidly rich are conspicuous in their consumption, crime explodes faster than when they’re discreet.
“Using variation within US states over time, we document a robust association between the distribution of conspicuous consumption and violent crime,” authors Daniel and Joan Hicks noted.
A study published in The Review of Economics and Statistics (Harvard/MIT) came to the same conclusion: inequality causes crime, not just poverty.
The World Economic Forum published a paper that looked at the relationship between inequality and crime in Mexico:
“Our key finding is that, in fact, municipalities with lower inequality saw lower rates of crime. In other words, while the overall national data reveals an apparent paradox; broken down by smaller geographical regions, the paradox does not hold — less economic disparity does lead to less crime.”
A study of 148,000 people across 142 countries found a similar association all over the world. The Economist magazine titled their review of it:
“The StarkRelationship Between Income Inequality and Crime.”
Research published by the Equality Trust in the UK, which studies the impacts of economic and social inequality, found:
“Small permanent decreases in inequality — such as reducing inequality from the level found in Spain to that in Canada — would reduce homicides by 20% and lead to a 23% long-term reduction in robberies.”
Inequality causes crime because it destroys social trust, the core fabric of any society. It essentially makes us crazy. Without social trust, empathy and shared values weaken and culture begins to disintegrate.
We see examples of this across the Third World in countries that have been essentially raped by their morbidly rich ruling class for decades. We think the problem is poverty, but really it’s the capture of government by corrupt oligarchs who are stealing everything that’s not nailed down.
Beyond a certain point—which we have long passed since the introduction of neoliberal Reaganomics—inequality becomes an actual poison to society itself.
Inequality, it turns out, is what’s driving much American crime while actively tearing our nation apart.
Which brings us to the GOP. The Republican Party is so committed to making morbidly rich people even richer (and keeping them that way) that former Republican Senator Rob Portman once bragged that the GOP wouldn’t go along with funding a bipartisan infrastructure bill because it let the IRS hire more auditors to catch rich tax cheats. Seriously.
That’s their position and they held to it through the vote. They’re still complaining: Republican Senator Ron Johnson recently warned that the IRS’s “jackbooted thugs” are coming for average Americans at the request of President Biden.
Republican Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming told Axios that:
“…spending $40 billion to super-size the IRS is very concerning. … Law-abiding Americans deserve better from their government than an army of bureaucrats snooping through their bank statements.”
Republican Senator Ted Cruz said:
“Throwing billions more taxpayer dollars at the IRS will only hurt Americans struggling to recover after waves of devastating lockdowns. … Instead of increasing funding for the IRS, we should abolish the damn place.”
Republican tax policies, starting with Reaganomics in the 1980s (and continuing to this very day) have both gutted the American working class and exploded inequality in this nation, all while making a few hundred thousand Americans obscenely rich.
We’ve even exceeded the worse inequality gap we’d ever seen in 1929 at the tail end of the “Roaring 20s” and the beginning of the Republican Great Depression (yes, they called it that until the early 1950s).
If we want to get crime under control and restore social cohesion to our society, we must tackle inequality. And that means to tax the morbidly rich who today typically pay less than 3 percent of their income in income taxes.
For most of the 20th century the top tax rate on income over around $5 million a year in today’s dollars was between 74 percent and 91 percent. The result was that CEOs only took 20 or 30 times as much as their average employees and typically lived in the same communities as their workers.
Today’s CEOs make hundreds to thousands of times what their workers make (depending on the industry) and live in 30-room mansions with servants quarters, yachts, and private jets.
Three men now own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans. This is a prescription for social and cultural disaster, and we’re seeing just that played out today right in front of us.
Donald Trump ran for president in 2016 saying he was going to raise taxes on the rich so much that his friends would refuse to talk to him. He said he was going to bring our factories back home from China and Mexico and restore the bargaining power of unions. He said he was going to give everybody in America health insurance “better than Obamacare” at a lower cost.
He ran—and won—on rebalancing wealth in this country. He was lying, of course, as Trump always does, but that experience should show how ready Americans are to leave behind Reaganomics and see billionaires once again pay the kind of tax rates that existed before the neoliberal Reagan Revolution.
Americans don’t know the actual statistics, but most people know in their gut that something is terribly wrong in this country.
And now that the Supreme Court has legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision, the morbidly rich are using their pocket change to further corrupt our political system to keep things the way they are by pouring billions into the campaigns of friendly politicians.
Community policing and a variety of other solutions are important, but if we don’t address the core problem of inequality in our society, they’re merely band-aids on the cancer of this social crisis.
If we’re serious about reducing crime in America, it’s time to reduce inequality by taxing the rich and our nation’s largest corporations, the majority of which pay virtually nothing in income taxes.
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What about the police? Last I checked, federal, state, and local law enforcement steal more cash and property via civil asset forfeitures than the burglars and thieves thieves based only their word and rarely charging anyone with a crime.
The laws were supposed to be used on drug kingpins, but now just having cash is reason enough. Aside from the greed and corruption, government does not want to raise the taxes necessary even for even modest policing, yet they want ever larger, increasingly well paid, and lavishly equipped gendarmerie. The money for it has to come from somewhere. It is also used to replace property and business taxes of the state and local gentry and for the slush funds of police unions.
The United States is a predatory state with most of its victims being American.
Link didn’t work for me, but the ‘FAIR Act‘ has been locked in secondary House committtees since June despite a 26-0 approval by the Judiciary Committee.
“They came for the mobsters, but I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t…
-add-
drug dealer
drunk driver
tax cheat
terrorist
insurrectionist
latin mass attendee
parent at school board meeting
….
There are a few conservatives who legitimately care about this issue, but not many, and way too many politicians are happy with the status quo to get the vote of law enforcement. Often strange bedfellows of liberals and libertarians who try to speak up and act against it.
It has gotten pretty egregious in some areas where not even being charged with a crime and arrested still allows law enforcement to seize assets that are almost impossible to recover readily.
Also, there is another looming issue about how effective (or ineffective) the police in the country are at actually solving violent crimes. It is not good and has generally been headed in the wrong direction the last 20 years.
Inequality is insufficient.
Corruption of institutions is a requisite.
Drug prohibition works as well as the ban on alcohol. All know that, yet it prospers. It seems to be encouraged to act as a form of eugenic control.
That’s what I often say: much of the corruption we have is institutionalized. The so-called justice system serves those with power and is used to beat down and bankrupt those who don’t. Laws can simply be ignored, abused, or willfully misinterpreted by courts. Some SCOTUS decisions have made this glaringly obvious. (Citizens United makes a mockery of the Bill of Rights, for example).
Because Julian Assange embarrassed the US/UK and vassals, he is being persecuted on BS charges under the “Espionage Act”. He is not even a US citizen, the US and UK have no right to hold him in a max sec. prison for years. Freedom of the press? The law is openly abused
The Genocide of Gaza is another one: Congress flagrantly ignores its own legislation (AECA, UN Charter, Geneva Conventions etc.) and gives 10s billions away to support Apartheid and genocide. Equal application of law is made a mockery of daily.
I recall prof. W.K. Black saying that the mortgage fraud debacle that resulted in the crash of ’08 was the largest financial crimes in the history of the US, yet the Attorney General got on national TV and effectively said that the perps were above the law (TBTF) and that no one would be investigated, let alone indicted. That alone makes a mockery of equal application of law. The bailouts, QE, ZIRP policies etc. ensued. Millions lost their homes – and the call it the Justice Dept.?
The US tortured folks at Gitmo, Abu Ghraib etc. etc. with impunity. Entire countries have been destroyed and 100s of thousands killed, based on willful lies. No one is held to account, on the contrary. (Bush Jr. Tony Blair et al)
So, with the institutional corruption, there is an incentive for those in power: both in the so-called private and public sectors to commit more crime. Our society all too often rewards psychopaths/sociopaths and punishes those who stand up for justice. (the Gaza protesters as current case in point)
I’m no behavioral psychologist, but I would think the meth and fentanyl/opioid problems are acts of despair. People who have no hope, and people in desperation often turn to alcohol and drugs to ease the pain of living in a toxic society.
As Yves alludes, “white collar” financial crime dwarfs what most think of when they hear “crime”.
I’m afraid that, as US society slowly collapses, crime will just increase in proportion.
The “crime” referred to by Trump obviously does not include white collar crime as practiced by his kind.
“Corruption of institutions is a requisite.”
Bingo!
Laws always reduce freedoms and make those who pass them richer.
Protecting people and infantilizing them makes wonderful marketing opportunities.
The fish always rots at the head and the stink becomes inescapable, except for Americans, it seems. The British are also descending but in a more sophisticated way.
I loved listen to Hartman before 2016 after that its mostly trump trump and believe the reason he dont calculate white color crime its because walls street is now the democrat party and that guy do anything to protect the party even if it’s controlled by wall street. Just listen to how he talk about genocide in gaza you can see how far he will go. Sure he dont do it like Piers Morgan but you can see that his talking points is to protect biden and the democrat party so they dont get the blame
Tech Wall Street is Democrat, oil Wall Street is Republican…
I agree with this article–the fish rots from the head–but not with Thom Hartmann who seems to think the bad guys are all Republicans when many of the drivers of neoliberalism “new think” were Democrats. Yes we had Reagan and but also all the Democrats who voted for his tax cuts. Indeed didn’t SBF give lots of his lucre to Dems? Isn’t Pelosi a milllionaire along with the Clintons themselves and now Michelle?
All of our leaders are setting a bad example and have little sense of that “noblesse oblige” that the previous wealthy classes–i.e. the Roosevelts–used to defend themselves. FDR was perfectly happy with a “little White House” cabin in Georgia rather than a swank compound on Martha’s Vineyard. When the king came to visit Hyde Park he served hot dogs. He knew you had to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.
Meanwhile our Dems like Biden and the others are climbers. It’s all talk.
Hartmann’s logic is a little janky here. Poverty doesn’t cause crime but inequality does? Well OK, but inequality does result in poverty as he well notes in the article, so I really don’t get the distinction he’s trying to make here.
I’ve read him for a couple decades now, and at one point I think he could admit that it isn’t just Trump who lies, but that all politicians do, regardless of party, regardless of country. A little sad to see the TDS infect once good writers, likely because they know it leads to more clicks for them.
I do think there’s something to the “noblesse oblige” of older generations of wealthy people. A few weeks ago I mentioned sitting next to a Rockefeller at church as a kid, who I never would have known was one of the richest people in the country unless an adult had told me. He was a very humble man from what I saw. I since talked to my mother, and I don’t think I mentioned this previously – not only did he wear an old tweed coat with the arm patches, but my mother swears she could see the stitching on the back of the coat where someone had repaired a tear in the fabric. How many billionaires today would be caught wearing what was essentially a hand-me-down jacket?
Not every squilionaire behaved like this for sure, this Rockefeller’s own grandfather being a prime example, but “noblesse oblige” did exist.
I understood the distinction. It’s not that the poor will turn to crime, it’s that when the poor see crime rewarded, they join in the selfishness and looting.
That’s the theory as I read it. Although he maybe thinks it’s bitterness about inequality, not seeing crime work for the rich, that flips the switch.
Yes, I was shocked, too, when Hartmann jumped immediately to the Republican Party as the sole culprit. What rock has he been living under?
Reagan was bad but Bill Clinton took neoliberalism to a new level and destroyed what used to be Democrat Party alliance with the working class. It’s only gotten worse with all Dems after Clinton.(e.g., Obama bank bailouts)
Let’s ban billionaires. I am not joking. If a monopoly on power is bad, why not a monopoly on wealth? No one can be president, general, and Supreme Court justice at the same time, but a billionaire can exert undue influence over all of them without being called a dictator.
I agree. Wealth these days comes down to money. Think how difficult it would be to warehouse vast amounts of resources, which are potential wealth. Actual wealth, human cooperation, is never acknowledged because it is bedrock morality and we humans are Insecurity Incarnate – we don’t trust each other. Money is virtual wealth, but it is also the energy that runs the system. The means with which we create and distribute equality and security. So every time a rich person takes more than a fair share it removes that energy from the poor. In that sense monetary inequality, as a policy, creates the very inflation it despises. Because more money must be created to replace all the confiscated wealth so that society can keep functioning. And, ironically, our economy is dependent on consumerism so it is a vicious spiral by its very nature. And the punchline is that the rich complain about their taxes and stash their money in various tax havens. Which just makes inequality and the need to tax even more critical.
It’s beyond specious. Anyone who locates the source of inequality solely in the “Republican” agenda, and especially in the “Republican” tax code (LOL) deserves scorn. I’d go so far as to suggest that the Democrats are even more to blame since they protest themselves to be defenders of the little guy, the working class, blah, blah, blah. They protest too much, all the while enriching their re-election coffers by despoiling the hopes of the same.
Alexander Hamilton? Really?
Now let’s talk about the crime of war and how it motors the entire US economy, Thom.
Then again, Hartmann has excelled at partisan political milquetoastism his entire career so one should not be surprised (and if that’s ad hominem, sue me).
I agree, the willful hypocrisy is palpable. Hartmann has all too often in the past been an apologist for the status quo. Even the old-school leftist historian Howard Zinn, in his magnum opus (People’s History of the US) dedicates an entire chapter to the Bipartisan Consensus. Hartmann might as well be on the DNC payroll. It is not ad hom, what you say has been observed for years by many others.
apologist pays better, especially when there are no actual negative consequences for amplifying the status quo.
Let me add to the excellent comments of Carolinian, ciroc, and britzklieg. I worked in criminal justice for 34 years. I also raised two children from conception to adulthood. The question should be: Why don’t people commit crimes?
Empathy is a learned behavior. Human beings are born selfish and greedy. When their needs are met by caregivers they become socialized to the give-and-take of empathy. Television and the Internet dull the give-and-take of human relationships, as do inequality and unfairness.
People need to know that there is an adult in the room who will meet their needs. Even Hartmann’s idealized slums in Uganda, Venezuela, Manilla, or Thailand had informal mafias who maintained order by taking care of needs. This is why lawlessness is on the rise under neoliberalism/libertarianism. No adults in the room…
Addicts, as Yves noted, are notorious for doing whatever it takes to get their next fix. Rich addicts don’t need to commit crimes. A drug-addled rock star or investment banker doesn’t need to resort to petty crime to finance their habit.
That said, am I truly the only one who ever has heard of “Rat Park”? I made the mistake of watching a Douglas Murray documentary on opioids in America. Lots of hand-wringing, but not once did anybody ask the basic question of why so many Americans were so desperate to get high? I can bet you that every one of those Kensington street junkies has seen a derelict heroin addict before they started to use. So how bad did their lives have to be for them to even think of going down that road?
I suspect that Rat Park applies not just to drug addiction but to all sort of other things as well. Give humans a comfortable, clean, orderly society with social interaction and something productive to do and their need to get out of their heads and act disorderly diminishes accordingly.
Most of those junkies in Kensington started out on Percocets. I have a brother lost to addiction down there and I know many others who ended up down there or died and they are from the suburbs.
I think that might have been true at one time, that heroin users started off with prescription pain pills, but I thought it had bene hard to get an opioid prescription for some time now?
In the past five years or so, there has been a lot more attention and effort to prevent opioid prescription abuse and theft. Arguably, it has gone a little too far and made it difficult for patients on pain management to get access to necessary medications in some cases.
This is a very interesting topic, thank you. For those not satisfied with Hartmann’s work, I find prof. Richard Wilkinson very helpful in trying to understand the impact of inequality (he even has a book with that title) on societies. He has done a lot of research and is considered an expert in this field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_G._Wilkinson
Quite apart from the white-collar crimes, the absence of which Yves mentioned, sex crimes are also ignored by Hartmann.
I find it impossible to imagine a human society with no sexual taboos, the breaking of taboos is what we would call “crime”.
I find it difficult to see how changes in social inequality would change the frequency of sex crimes.
Hartman is right on! Except, escalating inequality is not only increasing crime but the political polarization and the culture wars. You can see conspiracy theories and authoritarianism both on the Right in Trump-land and on the Left in Woke-land. People don’t trust the “system” for good reason but don’t know how to change it, what with both parties bought off by big money, so many just want to destroy the current system in the hope that something better will evolve.
But history suggests that the coming collapse will be very destructive and prolonged, perhaps even for centuries or more due to ecological overshoot.
Totally agree w Yves re: white collar crime being undercountered, underpunished, undeterred. The GFC led to *2* prosecutions, which SDNY managed to lose by poor case presentation (confused the jurors). 2. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who exagerated details on their mortgage applications were prosecuted. Bo Diddley said it best when he said “it’s easier to rob a man with a fountain pen than a gun.”. True then. True now.
P
I think Woody Guthrie gets credit for that line from “Pretty Boy Floyd.”
Some of the most honest people I’ve met have been the poorest.
And often the most generous.
Hartmann is simple to understand as long as you keep his primary focus in mind; Democrats Good, Republicans Bad. That is all he’s been able to see for the last 6 or 7 years. He really doesn’t care about much else. Up until Trump came along he had some good things to say in his public forum.
It was always thus.
The very wealthy and the peasants.
With the very wealthy protected by the Police, whose major job was protecting the wealthy from the not wealthy.
Few rules for the wealthy, and many rules for the poor.
As the song refrain states:
Its the rich wot gets the pleasure, its the poor wot gets the blame.
There is no solution. If all the rich and powerful disappeared, replacements would fill the gaps.
Reading Animal farm illustrates the process: All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
I might buy some of the broad brushstrokes, but it is a strange argument to divorce inequality from poverty at the root of crime. The author should also specify what kinds of crimes he is focused on.
Also, I would love to get his take and see how it reconciles with US history, including the widespread influence of organized crime in the US from prohibition through the 1980s.
I had extended relatives in South Jersey who ran a successful salvage and trash-hauling business that allowed them to live comfortably. However, they still readily stole hand over fist from the docks in Camden and other related shipping businesses because it gave them a lot of extra income. They weren’t part of an organized Italian crime family. Still, they did have to kick up & pay tribute to members of the Bruno crime family (Philadelphia La Costra Nostra) for the crimes they committed. What does that remotely have to do with inequality or poverty?
“If we’re serious about reducing crime in America, it’s time to reduce inequality by taxing the rich and our nation’s largest corporations, the majority of which pay virtually nothing in income taxes.” This statement by Hartman is incomplete, thus, incorrect. Yes, inequality can and will lead to crimes of all sorts but Confucius states:
“If you lead the people with correctness, who will dare not be correct?” Confucius believed that a leader’s integrity and moral correctness inspire others to follow suit. When leaders set the right example, their followers will naturally align with those values.
“Go before the people with your example, and be laborious in their affairs.” A leader should lead by example, actively engaging in the concerns of the people they serve. This approach fosters trust and respect.
Hartman should have focused on our “so-called” leadership and their criminal lifestyles (Trump and Biden included, and yes Democrats and Republicans). Therefore, when it is so obvious that Nancy Pelosi uses in-sider traders to become more wealth (a CRIME by the way) and there are no, absolutely no consequences, what is being said to the general public. Come on Hartman, stop your bullshit on Reagan, Trump and Republicans as being the forces behind all that’s wrong in this country. And so what’s wrong in this nation leading to so much crime?
“If you lead the people with correctness, who will dare not be correct?” “Go before the people with your example, and be laborious in their affairs.” Where does this “inequality” of Hartman come from? Personally, I agree with Confucius.
I am not a particular Trump fan and the tax reform he did pass did not address the bulk of the problem but the elimination of the SALT deduction was a direct hit at the rich…..not the middle class or the poor. A small hit but a hit nevertheless.
Actually particularly the PMC in high income tax, as in blue, states.
It would have absolutely hit the working class and the almost poor without the $10,000 allowance. And that was a late addition by smarter heads than those supposedly low tax staters behind it aiming for the blue states. Not that it was done for them, it was added when they realized it they needed it to exempt most property taxes in their states so their constituents didn’t get obviously double taxed (sales taxes and taxes on services hide that so much easier). But it did also erase much of the penalty for the have nots in blue states.