Jock Gill, Clinton’s original tech advisor, has posted a column on a piece he thinks is missing from Paul Krugman‘s essay.

Jock agrees with Krugman about the economic divide: the top 1% of Americans have doubled their share of the nation’s wealth in the past 30 years, while the median income has grown only 10% in the same time. But he disputes Krugman’s claim that “Gilded Ages and Gilded Plutocrats, not relative middle-class income equality, are the norm in American life.” Not before the Robber Barons, Jock says, because there weren’t yet corporations that “never die and do not vote, yet have the full legal and constitutional rights, and wealth that never dies even when the humans do.” The result is a corrupt political system that favors the rich.

Here’s why I’m depressed: We don’t care. We somehow believe we’re in an economy of abundance so the fact that the top 1% have the wealth of the bottom 40% doesn’t matter to us so long as we feel ok about ourselves. And when was the last time you heard a politician talk about the poor as anything except a burden to the rest of us? Or look beyond our borders to see the effect of our life on others, much less accept a moral responsibility to help raise up the world?

Except when Paul Wellstone spoke.

Speaking of Big Lies, Brad DeLong does a ripsnortin’ job on Chuck Grassley’s letter to the editor in the NY Times. Ironically, the letter purports to set the record straight about who gets what in the Bush tax cut plan, but Brad exposes the letter is a pack of untruths. (Thanks to Scott Rosenberg for the link.)

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