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Cheong Wa Dae has started posting a series of features titled "Should We Leave the Income Gap Time Bomb Ticking?" on its website. Ten articles are threatened altogether, apparently with the aim of getting a serious public debate going on an issue the president in his New Year address said was the most urgent task before the nation. It has barely got underway, however, and already it looks like agitprop with its bias and ¡°them and us¡± thinking.
The first article, titled, "Miracle and Despair: Two Sides of the Republic of Korea," says that since the 1997 IMF crisis, the country has been divided into the ¡°wealthy¡± 20 percent and the ¡°despairing¡± 80 percent. That polarization is ¡°a time bomb that could blow up the whole of Korean society," it says. "The growing gap is more serious than the number of the poor. Left unremedied, it would inevitably lead to resistance and a class struggle.¡±
The article likens Korea to a ¡°casino economy, where only the minority winners thrive and the majority losers cannot survive.¡± And again, ¡°a casino economy, where winner takes all, is crueler than the jungle, where only the fittest survive, because the avarice of the strong knows no bounds. It becomes a restless, inhuman society.¡± Thus the presidential office on Korea today.
In other words, it is the avarice and immorality of the wealthy 20 percent that has caused poverty, and if they don¡¯t abandon their wicked ways soon, the other 80 percent could rise up any moment. That is a preposterously distorted representation of reality.
The way you look at the problem determines the solution. If you approach it from a them-and-us perspective, it follows that the gap must be narrowed by means of taking away from one group and giving to the other. In reality, however, the poverty problem arises from declining investment and employment, in turn a consequence of the economy having been mired in low growth for several years and falling below the potential growth rate.
In a word, the income gap is not the result of the avarice of the upper 20 percent but of this government's failure to manage the economy. Blaming polarization is nothing but an attempt to pass the buck to investors.
There is something wrong, too, with trying to push the debate by way of the Cheong Wa Dae homepage. The government has ministries, agencies and commissions to deal with the problem. These bodies should address the poverty problem in a balanced manner and search for effective alternatives. Instead, the presidential office chose to put articles with all the subtlety of campus posters on its official website. Whose ideas are these? The president¡¯s own, his chief secretary¡¯s or his economic adviser¡¯s?
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