Moore's Speech Critiqued

            This article criticizes Michael Moore’s speech, “America is NOT Broke”, given to Wisconsin workers back in March. Michael mentions an astonishing statistic, “…just 400 Americans, 400, have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.” Moore goes on to say these 400 benefited from the 2008 bailout given to them in expense to the taxpayers. The author goes on to legitimize Moore’s claim about the wealth concentration. Forbes’s top 400 do indeed have ‘more than’, concerning wealth, the bottom 50% of the population. For clarification on what Moore and the author define “wealth” as the author states, “the Federal Reserve defines wealth as all financial and nonfinancial assets, including bank accounts, investments, houses, cars and debt.” It is Moore’s other claim that the top 400 benefitted from the bailouts and the gap between rich and poor is getting larger from these bailouts as well. Moore portrays that this gap is new or that this gap is somehow connected to the bailouts. The author goes on to say the wealth shares of the rich have not diverged since the 1980s. His closing question is, “Do you think America could or should rebalance the wealth of the Forbes listers and the bottom halfers?”

            I chose to connect this article to the “Poverty and Human Development” section of the course. We discussed in class the bailouts and the cause of the bailouts. This article touches on this a little bit. It also discusses how the richer are getting richer whereas the poorer are getting poorer. The main question in End of Poverty? is why is wealth increasing but more and more people are left without the essentials of life? This is what the author is questioning in his closing statement. Should America rebalance the wealth so more have more wealth?

I completely agree with the author of this article. Moore has a really valid point but correlation does not mean causation. The concentration of wealth has been reserved to the top 1% of the population since the late 1980s. The government bailouts may have helped these guys out a bit with their companies but did little to their bank accounts; although, it is not just their bank accounts that were taking into consideration when talking about wealth.

This article did not have any biases. The author sympathized with Moore on one of his claims but critiqued the other. The author was not presenting an opinioned based claim; he took some facts into consideration to question Moore’s claim. 

http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2011/03/07/billionaires-own-as-much-as-the-bottom-half-of-americans/