Phil Gramm Tries To Argue Income Inequality Is Made Up

The former Texas senator says U.S. incomes are becoming more equal. The audacity is magnificent. But evidence and logic fail him.

If Scrooge is the hero of A Christmas Carol, per Phil Gramm’s unique interrogation of the text, then kindly Old Fezziwig, pictured above, must be its villain. Discuss.

Remember Phil Gramm? For awhile the Texas senator, a Democrat who turned Republican early in the Reagan administration, looked unbeatable in the 1996 Republican nomination race for president. But he was out by February of that year. Voters didn’t like that Gramm was so … mean. Meanness was not yet the fashion in Republican politics; Gramm was a man tragically ahead of his time. Gramm retired from the Senate in 2003 and became an investment banker. That spared him having to answer for the financial deregulation he championed as chairman of the Finance Committee, which probably contributed to the 2007-9 Great Recession. Gramm initially pooh-poohed that downturn, the worst since World War II, as a “mental recession,” causing such a ruckus that he had to withdraw as co-chairman of John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Gramm is still with us, and feisty as ever. Indeed, at 80, he’s only a year older than our current president. Last week Gramm published a book, coauthored with two economists, titled The Myth of American Inequality, that’s at some risk of attracting attention on the right. I read it so you don’t have to.

Click here to read the first of my two New Republic pieces explaining why Gramm is so very wrong about income inequality, and here to read the second, which quotes at length Gramm’s heartfelt defense of Ebenezer Scrooge. Gramm says even Scrooge’s inventor, Charles Dickens, misunderstood the Victorian job creator whose tireless vigilance sustained England’s debtor’s prisons and workhouses.