reviewing recent figures on financial inequality.
Suppressing past impressions ties our process in a knot.
Our theories decree a rising sea must elevate every yacht.
Thus our consternation at these data disconcerting.
The evidence weighs heavily that certain folks are hurting.
Let us contemplate sincerely. We don’t mean this as a joke.
Is there an explanation why the poor remain so broke?
By cutting the tax on capital gains, Reagan without imbroglio
aided those advantaged by a blue chip-dense portfolio.
Clinton enacted NAFTA, letting jobs fly overseas,
while treating as fluff the making of stuff and the closure of factories.
Bush Junior lowered the income tax on the richest in the land,
Obama made bail for bankers who fail, gave workers the back of his hand.
Despite Trump’s canny efforts, each a bold, sagacious stroke,
there persists the observation that the poor remain so broke.
Maintenance of minimum wage at the level of decades ago,
encourages more hiring, a principle all of us know.
Companies changing citizenship as easy as changing a brand
is a rational evolution by the market’s invisible hand.
Yet adding up the numbers shows we’ve reached a pretty pass:
the declining health of financial wealth among the middle class.
Make them ask please for government cheese, a trick that needs mirrors and smoke.
Maybe it takes a magician to know why the poor remain so broke.
Joe Biden’s foreign policy is something to adore.
(We secretly turn Keynesian when it comes to making war.)
We have another secret–you’d be ill advised to mock–
No matter what they say we’re going back into Iraq.
It costs a million bucks for every missile Tomahawk.
To hell with writing poetry! Invest in Raytheon stock!
If they can’t follow this advice for dividends galore,
perhaps it is the poor’s own fault that they remain so poor.
With each and every failure parsing data economical,
economics as a specialty is proving rather comical.
Our hypotheses rejected, our conjectures rife with rot,
“Economics,” say the skeptics, “as a discipline is shot.”
For being wrong a time or two we need make no apology,
yet our theses prove as useful as if guided by astrology.
We simply can’t abide this, hence we must contrive to cloak
the fact we simply cannot fathom why the poor remain so broke.
We’ll corral these nasty numbers and we’ll hide them with a bed sheet.
We’ll manipulate the columns and fudge figures on our spreadsheet.
Not until it all can tally will we let ourselves relax.
Modern macroeconomics calls for management of facts.
Our revised results reveal that the poor have no regrets.
Some have cars and some have phones and some have TV sets.
Let us give one last conclusion ere we scurry out the door.
The reason why the poor stay broke: They’re broke because they’re poor.
