An Occupy Movement Based On 99% Lies

Inequality: As cities rousted Occupiers, liberals claimed the movement has already succeeded by calling attention to income inequality. But all it's really done is give the left an excuse to recycle bogus class-warfare claims.

Soon after Mayor Bloomberg cleared the Occupiers out of New York's Zuccotti Park, Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein reassured his fellow liberals. "The movement has already scored some big wins," he wrote, because it has "changed the national conversation." The evidence? The press has written lots of stories about income inequality lately.

Of course, counting news stories proves nothing. The liberal media love the Occupy crowd and what it stands for, and so it generously flooded the zone with adoring coverage, while carefully covering up the movement's violence, depravity and anti-American radicalism.

But then again, almost nothing that's been written or said about the Occupy movement and its main issue has been true.

Case in point is a recent New York Times op-ed by Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, in which he tries to convince readers that the Occupy movement is the leading edge of a progressive Nirvana. But his piece is rife with falsehoods.

In the very first paragraph, for example, Sachs claims that "we are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1% and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest."

In fact, the average income for the top 1% has dropped about 9% in real terms over the past decade, according to IRS data. Census data show a similar decline for top-income earners. Meanwhile, the Gini Index — a common measure of income inequality — has been almost dead flat since 2000.

And to the extent that inequality has climbed over the past 30 years, it's been in concert with economic growth, rising during the Reagan and Clinton boom years and sagging during economic slumps.

Sachs' claim that Reagan's policies punished the country with crushing unemployment is even more ludicrous. Reagan's tax-cutting, deregulating, fiscal conservative policies propelled the economy to an unprecedented era of sustained growth.

Between 1981 and 2008, unemployment averaged just 6%. Only after Obama started to undo everything Reagan achieved did unemployment spike, averaging 9.3% since he took office.

Sachs goes on to say that "taxes for the rich were slashed," though the share of federal income taxes paid by the top 1% is now 37% — up from 18% in 1980. Meanwhile, a new Congressional Budget Office report finds that when you account for all federal taxes, the income tax code is just as progressive today as it was in 1979.

Even Sachs' argument that the Occupy crowd is changing minds is bogus. The left has peddled the income inequality story for decades. Bill Clinton ran for president claiming the 1980s were a time "of greed and selfishness," when the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.

If anything, the Occupy crowd's efforts have backfired. A new survey by the liberal-leaning Public Policy Polling finds just 33% now support the Occupy movement, down from a month ago and lower than the 42% who say they support the Tea Party. And Gallup finds more identify themselves as conservative today than did so two years ago.

But fear not. Even after the Occupy movement fizzles completely, something else will soon come along that liberals and the press will grab onto as a sign that their much-hoped-for progressive era has arrived.