Some politicians — usually apologists for destructive trade agreements — are fond of saying that we need to put more resources into educating our people in 21st-century technologies, in order to compete more successfully with educated workers in other countries. This is their main prescription for restoring US competitiveness in the world economy.

It seems to me I heard the prez say essentially the same thing not long ago in a State of the Union address.

The following graph vividly illustrates the sad nature of this modern myth:

Inequality is driven primarily by government policies that favor the affluent, policies bought and paid-for by the affluent, who have disproportionate access to and influence over lawmakers/policymakers.

As the graph above shows, these policies went into high gear starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Reagan’s election ushered in the modern era of conservative political dominance and economic ascendency.

In a sane world, the meltdown of 2008 (which is still underway and is slowly deleveraging the global economy into the Second Great Depression) should have discredited conservative politics and these failed conservative economics for all time.

But, on the contrary, through the magic of overwhelming money influence, the perps are still in control of the levers of power throughout the world (a banker replaced Papandreou in Greece, a banker replaced Berlusconi in Italy, bankers are in charge in the US and Britain and elsewhere … ).

As Kurt Vonnegut liked to say, “So it goes …”