Bully worship

David Sligar tweeted an image that portrays income distribution. It was created by Dutch economist Jan Pen based on data of the UN in 1971. That means inequality is much worse today. The image shows people in which their height is based on their income. People in the 10th percentile (10% of the crowd earn less) are portrayed as 7 inches (it looks like someone converted from metric to US measurements). Those at the 35th percentile are 2’6”, at 65th are 5’9” (an average height). 85th percentile – 10’ 92.5 percentile – 13’9” 97th percentile – 21’ 99.5 percentile – 49’ 99.95 percentile – 181’ – This figure fills the vertical space of the image. 99.995 percentile – 933’ – All we see of this figure is the shoe and pant cuff. Dan Riffle responded:

The 95th percentile of income is closer—much, much closer—to the 25th percentile than the 99th. The 99th is also closer—much, much closer—to the 25th than to the 99.99th.

Becca Rose tweeted an image of who benefits from a higher minimum wage. People think a minimum wage earner is a teenager who works part time after schools to earn a little spending money while living with parents. The reality is the average age is 35 with 90% 20 and older, 59% are women, 28% have children, 54% work full time. A majority of minimum wage workers are what we’ve been calling essential and front-line workers. As for those teenagers, they’re probably trying to save for college and deserve a good wage too. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos wrote:

For Republicans—and Joe Manchin [conservative Dem from WV]—failing to raise the minimum wage may seem like a passive act. It’s not. This is an active suppression of working class wages that plays a major role in the enormous wealth transfer that has gone on for over 40 years: The transfer of wealth from working class Americans to the wealthy few. … Keeping the minimum wage at a ridiculous low level allows companies to hire workers who must fall back on public support to get by. They subsidize their bottom line by externalizing the cost to everyone. Texas utilities may “hit the jackpot” when an emergency sends prices skyrocketing. But corporations employing workers at a deliberately low minimum wage are hitting that jackpot every day. Take the difference between $7.25/hour and a livable wage and multiply that value times the number of minimum wage workers. That’s the amount of money that’s getting scooped up from the government and shoved straight into the pockets of the billionaires at the top of these corporations every day. It’s the nation’s largest not-so-hidden corporate subsidy. ... Keeping the minimum wage low isn’t about creating jobs. It’s about funneling money. It’s about protecting the wealth concentration engine. It doesn’t just hurt the workers who are receiving those miserable salaries, it harms everyone.

The goal of the rich is that harm. The goal isn’t to be fabulously rich, the goal is to keep money out of the hands of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, to cause that harm. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, has a couple of tweets worth mentioning. Both have to do with the just concluded CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. Shane Goldmacher tweeted the results of the straw poll of who the crowd wanted to run for president in 2024. They ran it twice, once with the nasty guy on the ballot, once without. Alex Roarty summed up the results. Governors who pushed back on COVID restrictions (DeSantis of Florida and Noem of South Dakota) did better than legislators who tried to overturn election results (Cruz, Haley, Hawley). At the bottom were Ivanka at 3%, Rand Paul at 2% and Mike Pence at 1%. Though Dworkin quoted just the start of a thread by David Frum I had to go see the rest of it:

Much of @HawleyMO CPAC speech self-advertised his suffering for the pro-Trump cause. Big mistake. For the pro-Trump movement, victimhood is not an end in itself. For them, their victimhood is a justification for abusing others. They don't want martyrs. They want righteous bullies. Trumpism is not a system of ideas. It's simple bully worship, the kind you saw in schoolyards. Nobody in pro-Trump world cares about any of @HawleyMO half-cooked policy ideas. They only care about Big Tech to the extent that Big Tech is getting in the way of their bullying fun. ... You want to position yourself as Trump's successor? Don't waste time taking about issues. Show yourself the next meanest bully. Belittle people near Trump to show that the outgoing monster can't protect them from you. Trigger their blood lust, and prove you can satisfy it.

The nasty guy spoke at CPAC. Leah McElrath tweeted that she watched it so we don’t have to. Summary: the GOP plans to engage in major voter suppression in state legislatures across the country.