Not everyone would be surprised by this question. Marxist economists have long argued that capitalism will collapse due to rising inequality. Their argument in a nutshell is that inequality will rise to the point where workers can no longer afford to buy the products they are producing. With no customers, the economy will stagnate, leading to crisis and collapse.

Many orthodox economists also argue that inequality is bad for growth. High inequality encourages rent-seeking: it becomes more profitable to make money by moving to a higher-paid position in the economy than by increasing one’s own productivity. So for example industrial firms invest in finance, because that’s where the big rewards are. A few individuals get rich while the economy as a whole stalls.

There are many other variations on the idea that inequality is bad for growth. Of course, there also exist unreconstructed neoliberals who cling to the notion that inequality is good for growth. Despite all the evidence of the last forty years they still argue that inequality creates incentives that encourage people to work harder and be more productive.

Unfortunately for everyone in this debate, there is no empirical evidence whatsoever that economic inequality has any effect on economic growth. Personally, I am convinced that inequality is bad for growth. But I can’t prove it. The data give no clear answer either way.

One thing I can prove, however, is that inequality makes a small number of people incredibly richer and a large number of people much poorer. In the United States, for example, ordinary Americans are about half as well off as they would be if America had the same level of inequality today as it did forty years ago.

Rich Americans, on the other hand, are fantastically richer than they would be if America had the same level of inequality today as it did forty years ago. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but the figure is in the range of 20 times as rich. The rich have done very well from rising inequality.

Rising inequality since 1973 has essentially meant a vast transfer of income and wealth from the lower 80% or 90% of Americans to the top 1% or 0.1% of Americans.

Americans with JDs, MBAs, and MDs are about as well off today as they would have been had inequality remained at 1973 levels. Everyone below that level is worse off than they would have been. People without college degrees have been hit especially hard: they are worse off in absolute terms. They have actually seen their incomes decline since 1973.

Unlike the effect of inequality on growth, the effect of inequality on income distribution is not theoretical. It is direct and incontrovertible. High inequality means that many must do with less in order that some can have more. That’s not a theory of inequality. That’s the definition of inequality.

So to the inequality and growth debate, I say: who cares? If something is bad for 80% or 90% of the population, does it really matter whether or not it is also bad for growth? Isn’t it bad enough that it is bad for 80% or 90% of the population?

No one really knows how to promote economic growth. Everyone has their pet ideas — including me. But if we knew how to promote growth, would be doing it already. Everyone likes growth.

On the other hand, we know exactly how to reduce inequality. We can raise the minimum wage, increase taxes on investment income, expand public education, and make it easier for workers to join unions. Most of all, we can tax the rich at a higher rate and use the income generated to invest in making life better for everyone.

The inequality and growth debate is a red herring. It just doesn’t matter. The problem is inequality, and its solution is simple. It may not be easy to get rich people to give up some of their enormous gains of the last forty years, but it’s straightforward. Tax them. And use the proceeds to make our country — and our world — a better place for all.

According to the OECD, “inequality has increased by more over the past three years to the end of 2010 than in the previous twelve.” Things were already pretty bad in 2007, but inequality in America today exceeds the records last reached in the 1920s.

The United States has the fourth-highest level of inequality in the developed world, trailing only Chile, Mexico, and Turkey. That is to say, if you consider Chile, Mexico, and Turkey to be “developed” countries.

The OECD report measures inequality using a statistic called the Gini coefficient. The Gini coefficient runs from a minimum of 0 (perfect equality) to 100 (total inequality). Different countries have different ways of calculating Gini coefficients, but the OECD implements the same method across all countries to create comparable figures.

America’s Gini coefficient, as calculated by the OECD, stands at 38. Most developed countries have Gini coefficients that run much lower. The United Kingdom (35) is the developed country that comes closest to the United States, followed by Australia (33), Canada (32), France (30), Germany (29), Belgium (26), and Denmark (25).

No other developed country comes close to matching the levels of inequality that have arisen in the United States over the last forty years.

Another measure of inequality reported by the OECD tracks the 90/10 ratio. This is the ratio of incomes at the top (90th percentile) versus the bottom (10th percentile) of the workforce.

A typical professional with a postgraduate degree has an income that is higher than about 90 percent of the rest of the population. A typical unskilled worker has an income that is higher than about 10 percent of the population.

As a result, the 90/10 ratio is, roughly speaking, the ratio of what professionals like doctors and lawyers earn to what cleaners and fast food workers earn.

The United States has the third-highest 90/10 ratio in the OECD. In the United States, successful professionals make roughly 16 times as much as unskilled workers.

To put this in numbers, while a mail room attendant at a major law firm may make $20,000 per year, a partner in the same law firm may make $320,000 per year.

Among OECD countries, only Mexico and Turkey have higher 90/10 ratios than the United States. The average 90/10 ratio across all OECD countries is 9.4. In Canada, just across the border, the ratio is 9. In other words, American professionals make 16 times as much as their office cleaners. Canadian professionals make 9 times as much.

In most European countries, 90/10 ratios hover in the range between 6 and 8.

Not surprisingly, the United States also has the fifth-highest incidence of poverty in the OECD, after Chile, Mexico, Turkey, and close U.S. ally Israel. All told, the United States now shows higher levels of inequality and poverty than such crisis-hit countries as Greece, Portugal, and Spain.

The global financial crisis has affected the whole world, but the ensuing Great Recession has been a surprisingly selective recession.

Economies may have stagnated since 2007 across the North America, Europe, and Japan since 2007, but not for the rich. The rich have continued to get richer. Forbes reports that 2013 rates as a record year for billionaires and their fortunes.

Well-off Americans  — those in the top 7 percent — have seen their wealth expand by 28 percent in recent years, according to a study from the Pew Research Center, while the rest have seen their wealth drop.

The Great Depression of the 1930s saw a different story. Back then, nearly everyone suffered. Of course, in the 1930s the poor suffered much more than the rich, but rich people ended up much worse off in 1939 than they had been in 1929. Maybe that’s why they were so keen to do something about it.

In today’s Great Recession the rich seem much more complacent. They can afford to be. We’re not experiencing a recession for the rich, only a recession for the rest.

This week’s OECD report shows that America isn’t the only country experiencing rising inequality in a time of economic stagnation. Inequality rose in 27 out of 33 countries the study spotlights. The difference: Inequality in the United States had already reached a record high in 2007.

The report ends with an ominous warning. The OECD’s new statistics only cover the period up through 2010. Things have likely gone, the OECD suggests, from bad to worse since then. The United States has certainly seen no let up in pressures on ordinary people and the poor.

We may not know how to restart economic growth, but we know how to fight inequality. We can raise the minimum wage, increase taxes on investment income, expand public education, and make it easier for workers to join unions. We can start now. We don’t have to wait for the next OECD report to show that America remains at the bottom.

In fact, sales of Bentleys (average price around $300,000) are up 60% this year in the United Kingdom, according to a report in the Guardian newspaper.

Bentley sales are also up 35% in the United States.

To put this in perspective, the US economy grew by just 2.2% in 2012. The UK economy grew even less: 0.2%, according to statistics from the International Monetary Fund.

How can sales of super-luxury cars grow at super-fast rates during a recession? The answer is simple: it’s not a recession for everyone.

The last five years have been one of the best times in human history to be rich, and an even better time to be super-rich. The plutonomy — the economy of the super-wealthy — has been growing by leaps and bounds.

Unfortunately, most of us don’t live in the plutonomy. In the realonomy where ordinary people work (or don’t work) things have been much tougher.

The difference is striking. Consider that all-American company, General Motors. According to data compiled by Automotive News, GM sales are up 10% so far this year. Not bad.

But GM famously offers a brand for every level of consumer. Chevy sales are up just 6%. Buick sales are doing better, up 23%. And Cadillac sales? You guessed it: up 37%.

Acura sales are outpacing Honda sales. Infiniti sales are outpacing Nissan sales. Lexus sales are outpacing Toyota sales. In fact, the only company where the mass-market brand is growing faster than the elite brand is Ford — and that’s only because Ford doesn’t separate Ford car from Ford truck sales.

Of course, it’s the more expensive trucks that are leading Ford to higher profits.

The fact is that times are not tough for everyone. Times are tough for low-income people, unemployed people, farmers, and the elderly. For high-income professionals times are pretty good.

For corporate leaders, hedge fund managers, and CEOs, happy days are here again.

So the next time you hear that times are tough and belts need tightening, ask yourself who’s saying that times are tough and whose belts it is they want to tighten. Changes are it’s a highly-paid corporate lobbyist who’s saying that times are tough … and it’s someone else’s belt that needs tightening.

American national income per person is now just about back at 2007 levels. The losses of the Great Recession have been made up. In a very real sense, every American could be doing just as well as in 2007.

The reality is that America’s plutonomy is doing fabulously better than in 2007, while America’s realonomy flounders along at rock bottom. The Great Recession hasn’t meant so much the destruction of wealth as the transfer of wealth. The poor have gotten poorer and the rich have gotten richer, leaving the whole country right back where it was.

Except that the country as a whole is now even more unequal than it was in 2007.

They concluded that above the threshold where government debt exceeds 90 percent of national income, “median growth rates fall by one percent, and average growth falls considerably more.”

Following on the heels of the 2008 global financial crisis and the associated spike in government borrowing in Europe and the United States, the Reinhart-Rogoff paper quickly became a touchstone for the small-government crowd. Austerity is the order of the day. Reinhart and Rogoff are its prophets.

Now three economists at the decidedly less upscale University of Massachusetts – Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin – have uncovered a series of errors and outright blunders in the Reinhart-Rogoff results.

Not only did the trio show that Reinhart and Rogoff misinterpreted and misanalyzed their data, they also found a simple spreadsheet error that dramatically changed the statistical results. Austerity, it turns out, only works if you don’t know how to use Excel.

Reinhart and Rogoff have acknowledged their errors, though they are at pains to stress that the errors are largely immaterial to their overall conclusions that government debt levels of more than 90 percent of national income are associated with low levels of economic growth.

They also somewhat disingenuously point out that “We are very careful in all our papers to speak of ‘association’ and not ‘causality.’ ” Disingenuously, since their pro-austerity stance shines through all their work. After all, the title of their 2010 paper was “Growth in a Time of Debt,” not “Debt in a Time of Recession.”

Especially misleading is a chart in their paper that shows US economic growth rates for four different levels of US government debt, with the bars becoming alarmingly redder as the debt levels increased.

Reinhart and Rogoff analyzed 220 years of US economic history to conclude that, on average, the US economy has consistently grown at rates over 3 percent per year at all levels of government debt from 0 percent to 90 percent of national income. But when US government debt has risen above 90 percent, the US economy has contracted, they found.

Nowhere in their paper do they mention just when it was that US government debt rose above 90 percent of national income. Was it the Great Depression? No. The Bush or Obama years? No. Perhaps back in the 19th century? No.

In fact, in its 220-year recorded economic history, the United States has only ever experienced four years in which federal government debt exceeded 90 percent of US national income: 1944, 1945, 1946 and 1947.

In those four years, real economic growth was 8.1 percent, -1.1 percent, -10.9 percent and -0.9 percent, respectively. Which tells us absolutely nothing, except that after a huge world war it takes some time for an economy to readjust to peacetime production. Anyone who says that America’s sudden recession in 1946 was due to government debt, not the end of the war, is either crazy, deceitful or stupid.

Carmen Reinhart is the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Kenneth Rogoff is the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics at Harvard University. You be the judge.

Actually, Reinhart and Rogoff do recognize the warping effects of World War II – on Australia and New Zealand. In those two countries Reinhart and Rogoff found that high debt was actually associated with stronger than average economic growth. But they (correctly) wrote this off as a distortion caused by the war.

In fact, of the 20 rich countries studied by Reinhart and Rogoff, only one example shows negative growth resulting from high debt: the United States after World War II. But despite the fact that they are American, live in America and mainly study the US economy, they fail to note that the only period of high debt coupled with recession in US history was the 1946 demobilization after World War II.

Apparently war distorts the data when it makes debt look good, but war isn’t worth mentioning when it makes debt look bad.

It gets worse. University of Southern California professor Richard Green raises an even bigger issue. In a column for Forbes magazine, he suggests that it may be the case that debt doesn’t cause low growth. It may be that low growth causes governments to go into debt.

Green presents very preliminary statistical results in his column based on a standard econometric technique called the Granger causality test. His results suggest that the impact of high debt on economic growth is either positive or neutral, while the impact of economic growth on high debt is either negative or neutral.

This is strong first-look evidence that recessions cause debt, not the other way around. But no one – Green included – expects to solve this complex statistical issue in a 600-word column. The travesty is that Reinhart and Rogoff didn’t even raise the issue in a 25-page academic paper.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics. It is easy to massage data. For example, why should one expect high government debt to have an immediate impact on economic growth? Reinhart and Rogoff could just as well have studied the impact of government debt on growth rates several years later.

If they had, they might have found that in the United States, high government debt was associated with rapid economic growth. US government debt peaked in 1945 at 112.7 percent of national income. Five years later, in 1950, the US economy was racing ahead at an 8.7 percent growth rate.

The potential lesson for today? If we borrow heavily in 2013, we can enjoy a huge growth dividend in 2018.

Of course, that lesson is no more valid than Reinhart and Rogoff’s austerity lesson. But it’s no less valid.

If we borrow now to invest in education, job training and infrastructure, it’s likely we will have robust growth in 2018. But we don’t know that from Reinhart and Rogoff’s historical data. We know that from common sense.

Even if the expected economic growth doesn’t materialize, we will still have the education, the job training and the infrastructure to show for our spending. That’s something.

At a time when the US government can borrow for five years for less than 1 percent annual interest and for 30 years for less then 3 percent annual interest, it’s crazy to be cutting government spending instead of investing in our future. Well, it’s either crazy, deceitful or stupid. You be the judge.

Of course, all things are not equal.  It pays to behave badly.  Greedy, selfish, self-promoting people get more money and other rewards than those who behave honorably.  This applies to equally to everyone from plumbers to politicians.

But look at this another way.  You have to pay people more to be bad than to be good.  Yes, people will be greedy and selfish — but only for a price.  You have to compensate people for being evil.  People will be good for free.

The for-profit sector has to pay market rates for its workers.  The non-profit sector pays much less, when it pays at all.

Pro-corporate think tanks pay high salaries.  Pro-public think tanks are staffed mostly with volunteers.

Tea Party rallies are organized by paid hacks.  Occupy rallies are self-organized by people who contribute money as well as time to their causes.  Often they contribute their bodies as well, putting themselves at risk of police brutality and even imprisonment.

If all people were paid the same salaries regardless of their behavior, regardless of the goodness or badness of their work, anti-social industries would have a hard time surviving.  Very few people actually want to do the devil’s work.

That’s where inequality comes in.  When the inequalities in rewards between doing good and doing bad are small, most people will choose the good.  In a world of equal wages, there would be no incentive for evil.  The more inequality there is, the larger the incentives for greedy behavior become.

This is because rising inequality means that the rewards of those activities that are already at a premium get larger and larger relative to the rewards of those activities that are not.

Instead of paying 10% more than the non-profit sector, corporations start to pay 20% more, 50% more, 100% more.  At some point, the gap is so large that almost no one is willing to work in the non-profit sector.  Nearly everyone has a price.

That is why it is becoming harder and harder to get people to go into teaching and nursing.  These are tough jobs requiring high levels of education.  Why should people train as teachers or nurses when they can go into sales with hardly any training at all, and sales careers pay better?

Why should doctors serve rural community with basic healthcare when the rewards for catering to the whims of the rich — or worse, the pharmaceutical industry — are so much greater?

Rising inequality is inexorably leading to the demise of our better natures.  Inequality corrupts because inequality fuels greed.  With today’s levels of inequality, there’s just much more to be greedy for.

Most people believe that there should be some amount of inequality in society. No one knows what the “right” level of inequality is.  But it’s hard to believe that in the 1950s and 1960s America was dangerously too equal.  Whatever level of inequality we had back then, it was certainly enough.

Now we have twice as much inequality.  Is that good?  I think the obvious answer is no.  Forget about asking whether or not inequality is good.  Ask instead how much inequality is good.  Whatever the answer is, it’s less than we have now.

Greed is not good, and high inequality is making all of us greedier than we should be.  Greedier than we could be.  Would you leave a high-pressure professional job for the non-profit sector?  Probably not if it involved a 50% pay cut.  But if doing good involved just a 5% pay cut, we would all probably be better people.

At a time when millions of Americans are out of work or even out of a home in America’s Realonomy — the real economy where ordinary people work, live, and try to get by — it is ridiculous that the top political priority in Washington is finding ways to cut the federal budget.

Cuts to the government budgets (aside from weapons systems and other corporate contracts) are popular in America’s business community because they make tax cuts possible. And tax cuts almost always mean tax cuts for business and the wealthy.

The only broad-based tax cut of the last fifty years, 2% the Social Security tax cut, only lasted for two years: 2011 and 2012.

Why is government more concerned with keeping business happy than with helping ordinary Americans? In a word: corruption. Corruption caused by extraordinary levels of economic inequality.

When inequality is low, as it was in America during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, politicians care enormously about the well-being of ordinary people. Ordinary people have money to give. More importantly, ordinary people feel empowered to monitor and discipline their representatives.

When inequality is low, workers can afford to pay dues to representative organizations. Ordinary people have more free time and gain more education. People have the luxury of participating in democratic society rather than just working to get by.

When inequality is low, rich people just aren’t rich enough to corrupt the government.

The rising inequality of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s led to such a massive shift in America’s income that today ordinary people simply don’t matter to politicians. Only the wealthy matter. And of course America’s multi-billion dollar corporations.

The irony is that the scale of private spending to influence politicians and campaign outcomes — a few billion dollars a year — is trivial compared to the rewards at stake. For example, the Bush tax cuts constituted a 300 billion dollar a year gift to the wealthy. Private investors in the Bush campaigns were repaid a hundred times over.

Policies like low taxes, high defense appropriations, and the privatization of government services are incredibly corrupt because they represent an incredibly expensive way to benefit a small number of people.

On the other hand, untried policies like increasing Social Security benefits and raising the minimum wage may be equally expansive, but would benefit tens of millions of people in America’s struggling Realonomy.

Call it vote-buying if you want, but when a government effectively buys the votes of 80 or 90 percent of the population, I call that government of the people, by the people, for the people.

Government should serve the people — as many people as possible. Until the Supreme Court gives corporations the right to vote, that means us. We should not be shy about demanding policies that benefit the majority. Only a corrupt government prioritizes the desires of the few over the needs of the many.

In the middle of the election cycle, corporations spend millions of dollars on dishonest attack ads against your opponent. Your opponent’s campaign crumbles. You are reelected in a landslide.

Once in office, you push through tax breaks for profitable corporations and their CEOs. You serve out your term, then retire. The day after you retire you are appointed to the boards of directors of eight different corporations.

Each board position pays you a salary of $150,000 a year for attendance at six meetings per year, for a grand total of $1.2 million a year for less then 50 days’ work. You spend the rest of your life living well and playing golf.

Is that illegal? Certainly not. Quite the contrary. It’s business as usual.

Is that corruption? Well, it depends what you mean by corruption.

Very few wealthy people or corporations literally pay cash bribes to politicians, so if your definition of corruption is bribe-paying, American politics is probably not that corrupt. But let’s face facts. It’s corruption.

High levels of inequality in society create enormous incentives for corruption. In the low-inequality America of yesterday there were also incentives to be corrupt, but they were much smaller.

It used to be that only the most powerful corrupt politicians could become millionaires upon retirement. With today’s higher levels of inequality, any Congressperson can retire after two terms into a million dollar a year private sector “consulting” position.

The corrupting influence of inequality isn’t confined to politics. It is everywhere. For example, federal employees oversee bidding for big defense contracts. Will they perform their oversight in good faith?

When defense contractors offer former federal employees sweetheart jobs with 5% or 10% raises, federal employees will likely stand firm in their service to the people.

When defense contractors offer former federal employees double their former salaries, many federal employees might be tempted.

When defense contractors offer former federal employees ten times their former salaries, it’s a rare — one might say crazy — federal employee who resists temptation and refuses to give in to corruption.

We all know that evil pays better than good. But we live in a world of degrees, not a world of absolutes. Inequality is corrupting because it raises the rewards for being evil to the point where almost no one continues to resist.

Should a corporate chief executive allow his or her company to pollute the environment in a way that leads to hundreds of people dying of cancer decades down the road?

For $100,000 a year, few of us would be willing to take decisions that we know will bring horrible deaths to other people.

For $1,000,000 a year, you’ll find volunteers.

For $10,000,000 a year, almost any high-achieving corporate executive can find ways to rationalize the evil that his or her company commits, convincing himself or herself that the blame really lies with someone else.

For $100,000,000 a year, you can easily find people who will knowingly kill hundreds or thousands of people just to keep their own profits flowing.

A world in which CEO salaries were capped at 500,000 a year would be a much more moral world.

Inequality corrupts. It corrupts society at all levels. At the top, otherwise normal people will do morally despicable things if the payoff is high enough. A million dollars a year compensates for a lot of cognitive dissonance.

At the bottom, inequality also forces people to make choices they would never otherwise make. When people have stable, well-paying jobs with full health insurance, sick pay, and vacation time they are very unlikely to steal from other people.

They are very unlikely to deal drugs, mug people at gunpoint, or steal cars.

Even when inequality is low, there are corrupt politicians and depraved criminals. But when inequality is high the incentives at both ends of the spectrum become much stronger. Inequality doesn’t make people behave badly, but it encourages people to behave badly.

There are lots of reasons to reverse America’s enormous economic inequality. Economic justice alone demands that the rich not be so rich and the poor not be so poor.

Nonetheless, the morally corrupting influence of inequality is equally troubling.

Would you sell your soul for $10? Certainly not. But would you sell your soul for $10 million, or $10 billion? No one should be faced with that choice. In a low-inequality society, no one is.

Like the United States government, the government of Cyprus guarantees most bank deposits against losses.  So a failure of Cyrpus’s banks would result in a budget crisis for the government as well.

While it is easy to fault Cyprus for its failed policies, let’s not forget that the banking system of the United States of America collapsed five years ago.  Little Cyprus (population 840,000) held out five years longer than the richest and most powerful country in the world.

What’s more, Cypriot banks have failed because they have engaged in all the risky business practices that US banks taught them.  On top of that they implemented a US-style regime of self-regulation.

As a result, it’s no surprise that Bank of Cyprus is now going the way of Citibank.  The surprise is that it took so long.

Unfortunately, the Cypriot government and the European Union are also following the US policy of bailing out their banks, letting managers and bondholders get off scott free.

In the US it was the taxpayers who paid the bill.  In Cyprus, though, many of the bank depositors are actually foreign (rumored to be Russian).  So in Cyprus they plan to make the depositors pay.

Like the United States, European Union countries provide guarantees to bank depositors.  In Cyprus your first 100,000 Euros are guaranteed against losses if your bank goes bankrupt.

Any deposits over 100,000 Euros are theoretically at risk, but there’s a clear legal hierarchy of who takes losses and who gets paid.  First the bank’s owners get wiped out.  After all, they’re the ones who racked up the losses that bust the bank.

Next the bondholders — the professional investors who lent money to the bank itself — take their losses.  Then, only after the pros have been wiped out, do the amateurs — the depositors — lose any money.

That’s the theory of what happens when a bank goes bankrupt.  Except that Cyprus’s banks are not going bankrupt.  To prevent a bankruptcy, the European Union wants the government of Cyprus to declare a one-time tax on bank deposits.

That’s right.  If the government takes 20% of your deposited funds and uses the money to bail out your bank, your bank won’t go bankrupt and your deposits won’t be at risk.  Of course, you’ll have only 80% of your money, but technically your 80% is still perfectly safe and guaranteed by government deposit insurance.

In other words, it’s the Great Cyprus Bank Robbery.

No doubt Cyprus has made many mistakes in its bank regulations and policies.  But anyone who thinks that a country of 840,000 is making up its own policies is crazy.  Cyprus has implemented the policies that the US and EU have recommended for it.

Now that Cyprus’s banks are in trouble, the EU is demanding that Cyprus bail out its banks — and make the depositors pay for the bailout.  It’s no mystery why.  Most of the bondholders who lent to Cyprus’s banks are banks in other European countries.

Cyprus should let its banks fail, then see where the chips fall.  Depositors should be protected as much as possible.  Ultimately, if there are deposit insurance bills to pay, the government should pay for them.  If that means higher taxes, so be it.

But to make bank depositors pay for a bank bailout is sheer robbery.  There is no other word for it.  A lawyer may argue that legally it is a preemptive tax, but morally it is robbery all the same.