MSNBC’s James Woods-dubbed “media gnat” Ali Velshi continues to illustrate why socialist media talking heads know as much about sound economics as flat-earthers know about astrophysics.
Velshi went on a rant against rich people and American capitalism during the August 23 edition of MSNBC’s Velshi, an irony since he has an estimated net worth of $5 million. He bellyached over a strawman notion that “America has been sold a myth” that the rich have been punished by a punitive tax system, when the “reality is economic policy hasn’t even remotely punished the elites in this country. It has simply rewarded them.”
It’s as if Velshi believes that the American economy should be actively punishing those who pay 40 percent of the nation’s taxes at a whopping 26.1 percent tax rate. Harping on a typical Marxist us vs. them dichotomy, Velshi twisted statistics completely out of context to make it seem like the middle class and poor are the victims of an unfair economy benefiting the wealthy, like we haven’t heard that argument before.
His solution? Just throw taxpayer money at everything, learning nothing from the incessant spendthrift behavior that defined the Bidenomics agenda of the past four years that caused America’s 40-year high inflation crisis.
To stick it to the rich, Velshi advocated for “deliberate, systemic choices” such as lefty pie-in-the-sky items like “universal healthcare,” “universal and subsidized childcare,” a “national affordable housing infrastructure plan,” green “resilient clean energy infrastructure,” a “national carbon price,” and funding for “large-scale reforestation,” "wetland restoration” and “urban heat island mitigation projects.” What does any of this have to do with increasing the amount in people’s paychecks? Nothing really, but the enormous tax increases that would have to be implemented to subsidize these crazy government programs would definitely make bureaucrats and lefty elites chomp at the bit.
The kind of I’m-from-the-government-and-I’m-here-to-help policies Velshi is endorsing are reflective of Bidenomics, which Velshi repeatedly simped for like an obedient flunky. But what can you expect from the same MSNBC hack who thinks the federal government has “a magical money tree with lots of money on it” to be plucked on a whim.
Velshi cited data from the George Soros-funded Economic Policy Institute (EPI) to show how worker productivity rose nearly 60 percent from 1979 to 2019, which he whined didn’t necessarily translate to proportionate wage increases. The problem? Velshi undermined his own argument by quickly conceding that the spike in productivity was “largely because of technology.” He didn’t expound on that of course. It seems significant, given that Reuters just reported that “recent academic work suggests that technology has been a net destroyer of jobs for decades.” In fact, “David Autor, an economist at MIT and winner of the 2005 John Clark Bates Medal, argues that since 1980, the jobs replaced by automation have not been fully offset by new jobs created,” according to Reuters. The suggestion is that as productivity increased, so did reliance on technologies that began to render jobs obsolete. But who’s paying attention to the details, right?
It’s not rocket science, Ali: The more expensive human labor becomes, the more likely companies will shift to cheaper alternatives like automation. Even the liberal Brookings Institution admitted this point when hiking the minimum wage to $15 an hour was all the buzz in 2015 just as the presidential election cycle was kicking off: “A higher minimum wage changes cost considerations for businesses seeking to automate more of their operations. Increasingly, low-skill workers will not only have to compete with each other for jobs at higher wages, but also with computers.”
What’s also noticeably missing from Velshi’s par-for-the-course fact-twisting rant is the share of federal taxes as a percentage of income over the years, which vastly undercuts his prima facie assertion that the rich are just getting richer at a larger clip than workers on lower income strata. For the same period that Velshi used to throw a temper tantrum over the distribution of wealth (1979-2019), CATO economist Chris Edwards noted that “The average tax rate on the top 1 percent has hovered above 25 percent since 1979. The average rate on middle-income households has fallen to 14 percent, and the average rate on the bottom one-fifth of households has plunged to near zero. The largest tax cuts have been at the bottom.”
Oh but Velshi wasn’t finished. He continued to argue that it was “deregulation” and trade agreements and policies that prioritized corporate margins that contributed to industrial blue-collar workers in manufacturing getting left behind while the economy slowly transitioned to its information-dominant era. What? In what world does anyone really think that American industry was just a deregulated free-for-all? The National Association of Manufacturers President Ryan Augsburger noted in 2023 that “More than 63% of manufacturers are spending more than 2,000 hours per year complying with federal regulations, diverting resources that would otherwise go towards employee compensation, new hires and additional investment in U.S. facilities.”
City Journal contributing editor Mark Mills wrote in 207 that “Complying with regulations costs manufacturers an average of $20,000 per employee per year, twice as great a burden as for other businesses.” Did Velshi concede any of this? Nope.
Velshi concluded by pontificating that an “economy that works for everyone isn’t a fantasy. It’s a choice. We’ve just been making the wrong one.” He’s right, but not in the anti-capitalist way he thinks.