The Top 1%

Posted by jns on 8 December 2004

Indulge me in just a couple quotations from Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
First, for later use in writing about epidemic innumeracy and its threat to the public, this alarming but illustrative statistic (p. 302):

Are you in the top 1% of earners? 19% of Americans say “yes”!

(This may come originally from an essay called “For Richer”, by Paul Krugman, that appeared in the New York Times, 20 October 2002.)
Now, from p. 352, the chapter called “What is a Lie”?:

And all the lies, small and large, add up. They create a worldview in which the mainstream media is a liberal propaganda machine. In which Democrats are ruthless, manipulative power grabbers. And also sissies. Where if you’re poor, you should blame yourself, and for everything else, blame Clinton. Where Democrats feed a culture of victimhood, but where the real victims are decent, hardworking white males. The right-wing media’s lies create a world in which no one needs to feel any obligation to anybody else. It’s a worldview designed to comfort the comfortable and further afflict the afflicted.