Without a moment's pause for reflection, Donald Trump has done a cannonball into the cesspool of U.S. neoliberal consensus politics. He's upset the still, fetid waters with his bloated, self-unaware orange corpus and in reaction conventional politicians and pundits are floundering, saying and doing things you would never see or hear them do otherwise, when everybody sticks to the script.
Such was the case yesterday with far-right political pundit Charles Krauthammer on the O'Reilly Factor.
Mark this moment: tried-and-true conservative Charles Krauthammer said that class and (lack of) education were central to Trump's appeal and the U.S. Presidential race.
He said, beautifully, that the GOP is already a party of whites, so Bill O'Reilly's adducing "white grievance" was irrelevant to the GOP primary contest.
Krauthammer said that Trump has tapped into something else.
If a Democrat would have said this on any other Monday, FOX would have shrieked "class warfare." But this was no ordinary Monday, no ordinary GOP primary. And sometimes, a little bit of the truth squirts out when you bite into a bullshit sandwich.
Enjoy:
http://video.foxnews.com/v/4831340298001/white-grievance-and-the-republican-party/
P.S. -- The bullshit bread of this truth sandwich was Krauthammer's assertion that we don't know how to address lack of education and opportunity in America. No, we know plenty. Just listen to Bernie Sanders. Step 1: Educate, train and heal American workers without putting them into a lifetime of debt. Step 2: Stop giving tax breaks and trade deals to multinational corporations (MNCs) that are nominally American yet do most of their production, and pay most of their taxes, overseas, and then "import" their products into America. Yeah, I'm talking about you, Apple.
Showing posts with label class warfare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label class warfare. Show all posts
Monday, April 4, 2016
Friday, March 21, 2014
Guerilla class warfare: IRS audits fewer rich, more poor people
Channeling the spirit of my man David Cay Johnston, I'm gonna tell you why this mundane story matters.
See, Republicans in Congress cynically under-fund the IRS year in, year out. So an undermanned, undertrained IRS makes do and does what comes easier, relatively -- auditing people with lower incomes. Because higher-income filers have lawyers and complicated returns and it requires more manpower to check them.
What this works out to, in reality, is a calculated game of probability by rich filers: if you're wealthy, and you're lawyered up, chances are you'll come away unaudited; and even if you are audited, you'll come away unscathed.
And so wealth inequality is a double-whammy for the poor and working class: earning so much less, they are still more likely to be audited.
BECAUSE THAT'S THE WAY THE GOP WANTS IT. Don't be naive and believe otherwise.
Finally, do I really have to explain how this makes no business sense? As every auditor knows, you focus your attention on the weakest control points with the highest potential for losses. The potential for losses among poor filers is minimal, almost nil.
All the Tea Partyers who are serious about fiscal health should cheer on the IRS, because every dollar spent on the IRS brings in $255 to the U.S. Treasury. Just by enforcing existing tax laws passed by Congress, nothing more. No other government agency can boast of such efficiency! And so it's time for the TPs to put up or shut up about the IRS, the only government agency that reduces the federal deficit.
By Patrick Temple-West
March 21, 2014 | Reuters
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service said on Friday that it audited fewer high-income Americans in 2013 than it did in 2012 or 2011, while it conducted more audits of people with no income.
Total audits fell by 5 percent from 2012 to reach the lowest level since 2008 as the IRS said it coped with budget cuts.
For the fiscal year that ended September 30, 2013, the IRS said it audited 24.2 percent of individual tax returns with adjusted gross income of $10 million or more. That was down from 27 percent in 2012 and 30 percent in 2011.
There were also fewer individual tax returns audited in the $5 million to $10 million gross income band, the IRS said.
In total, the IRS audited about 1.4 million individual returns. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said in a statement that budget cuts at the agency have "presented challenges."
Wealthy Americans historically are the likeliest to be audited. The IRS a few years ago started a "Global High Wealth Industry Group" to audit high-wealth individuals more efficiently.
But Congress in January cut the IRS's fiscal 2014 budget by about 4 percent to $11.3 billion.
The funding cuts have forced the IRS to cut the number of customer service representatives it employs during tax season, Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union said in a statement. "Both taxpayers and employees are frustrated."
Last year, audits were done on 6 percent of individual tax returns reporting no gross income, up from 2.7 percent in 2012 and 3.4 percent in 2011.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Study: Class mobility in U.S. is a myth
This is all essential reading, I just wish BI wouldn't use the term "social mobility," when they are really discussing class mobility.
It's typical of Americans and especially the MSM to avoid the concept of class altogether, because we're supposed to be a classless society... or God forbid, some disgruntled conservative will accuse somebody of "class warfare!" Oh no!
By Eric Zuesse
March 18, 2013 | Business Insider
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Lowry: Romney's argument 'flawed & dangerous'
You won't hear (see) me say this often, so get ready: arch-conservative Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, is right. He's correct. Take his conclusion:
This tendency [to demand that poor people pay federal income tax] represents a backdoor return to country-club Republicanism, with the approval of part of the Republican base. Fear of the creation of a class of “takers” can slide into disdain for people who are too poor — or have too many kids or are too old — to pay their damn taxes. For a whiff of how politically unattractive this point of view can be, just look at the Romney fundraising video.
Wow. He actually gets it this time. No further comment necessary.
His tax argument is flawed and dangerous.
By Rich Lowry
September 21, 2012 | National Review
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Frum: Mitt played up to the rich's class terror but got burned
Conservative pundit David Frum makes it clear what the 47 percent is meant to mean to Republicans, the facts be damned:
Start with this data point: When you ask white Americans to estimate the black population of the United States, the answer averages out at nearly 30%. Ask them to estimate the Hispanic population, and the answer averages out at 22%.So when a politician or a broadcaster talks about 47% in "dependency," the image that swims into many white voters' minds is not their mother in Florida, her Social Security untaxed, receiving Medicare benefits vastly greater than her lifetime tax contributions; it is not their uncle, laid off after 30 years and now too old to start over. No, the image that comes into mind is minorities on welfare.
It's also a lot of silly and, frankly, disproven fear about Obama's diabolical designs on the wealthy (his first term is almost over and America still exists, pretty much as it was under Dubya):
The background to so much of the politics of the past four years is the mood of apocalyptic terror that has gripped so much of the American upper class.Hucksters of all kinds have battened on this terror. They tell them that free enterprise is under attack; that Obama is a socialist, a Marxist, a fascist, an anti-colonialist. Only by donating to my think tank, buying my book, watching my network, going to my movie, can you - can we - stop him before he seizes everything to give to his base of "bums," as Charles Murray memorably called them.And what makes it all both so heart-rending and so outrageous is that all this is occurring at a time when economically disadvantaged Americans have never been so demoralized and passive, never exerted less political clout. [...]Yet even so, the rich and the old are scared witless! Watch the trailer of Dinesh D'Souza's new movie to glimpse into their mental universe: chanting swarthy mobs, churches and banks under attack, angry black people grabbing at other people's houses.It's all a scam, but it's a spectacularly effective scam. Mitt Romney tried to make use of the scam, and now instead has fallen victim to it himself.
By David Frum
September 18, 2012 | Daily Beast
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
How Romney engaged in class warfare
Said Romney to a room of friendly, super-rich private donors in Boca Raton on May 17:
Here are the facts: 17 percent of those non-taxpayers are the elderly with little or no income who collect Social Security and Medicare -- services they paid their whole lives for. But the elderly are "dependent" in Romney's view. Only 18 percent have no tax liability (including FICA) because they have no labor income, for whatever reason (including college students and our combat troops, for example) -- they are the true "dependents" if you prefer that term. The remaining 28 percent are lower- and middle-class workers who do pay FICA tax levied on 100 percent of their income -- revenue from which goes to fund about half of the federal budget -- Medicare and Social Security. And why do they not pay any federal income tax? Because of Dubya's tax cuts, the Standard Deduction, Mortgage Interest Deduction and the Child Tax Credit, all popular tax expenditures in place long before Obama and upheld by Republicans.
Moreover, according to CNN, more than 90 percent of all those with zero federal income tax liability earn below $50,000.
This is blatant class warfare. There's no other term for it. Not only that, it's a lie.There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.
Here are the facts: 17 percent of those non-taxpayers are the elderly with little or no income who collect Social Security and Medicare -- services they paid their whole lives for. But the elderly are "dependent" in Romney's view. Only 18 percent have no tax liability (including FICA) because they have no labor income, for whatever reason (including college students and our combat troops, for example) -- they are the true "dependents" if you prefer that term. The remaining 28 percent are lower- and middle-class workers who do pay FICA tax levied on 100 percent of their income -- revenue from which goes to fund about half of the federal budget -- Medicare and Social Security. And why do they not pay any federal income tax? Because of Dubya's tax cuts, the Standard Deduction, Mortgage Interest Deduction and the Child Tax Credit, all popular tax expenditures in place long before Obama and upheld by Republicans.
Moreover, according to CNN, more than 90 percent of all those with zero federal income tax liability earn below $50,000.
So Romney is basically admitting he can't win over the middle class, and he's blaming it on tax policies that have been in place for decades. Perhaps that's why Romney is silent on the middle class on his Issues web page.
Besides class warfare, it's preemptive excuse-making by Romney. He's laying the groundwork to justify later why he lost. At this fundraiser Romney admitted, "The fact that I'm either tied or close to the president…that's very interesting." Interesting, because he should be kicking Obama's tail in such a down economy and he knows it. But he's not. They are running neck and neck. Why? Because Romney sucks, and the GOP's ideas suck.
Now enjoy this:
When he doesn't know a camera's rolling, the GOP candidate shows his disdain for half of America.
By David Corn
September 17, 2012 | Mother Jones
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Studies: Wealth makes us worse human beings
I've been accused of encouraging class warfare with my calls to increase taxes on the richest One Percent of Americans.
Today I'm encouraging science. For instance, scientific studies show that, "The mere mention of money makes people less generous, less helpful and less likely to look for teammates."
So, higher taxation is not just about plugging our federal deficit, it's about helping rich people to be more generous, more helpful, and more empathetic. That's practically God's work!
By Bonnie Kavoussi
February 27, 2012 | Huffington Post
People with a few extra bucks just aren't as nice as the rest of us, at least according to a new study.
Rich people are more likely to take candy from children, lie, cheat, endorse unethical behavior at work, and cut off pedestrians while driving, a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found.
The report contradicts the notion that poor people are more likely to act unethically out of financial necessity. Instead, the researchers wrote the "relative independence" and "increased privacy" of the wealthy make them more likely to act unethically. They also share "feelings of entitlement and inattention to the consequences of one's actions on others" that may play into their moral decisions.
In one experiment, wealthier people took twice as many candies as poorer people from a jar that had been designated for children. In another study, nearly half of all drivers of expensive cars cut off pedestrians at crosswalks, while no drivers of the cheapest cars and about 30 percent of drivers of cheaper cars did the same thing.
Some of the other experiments indicated that the the rich were more likely to cheat in a game and lie to a potential job applicant about the possibility that their job was being eliminated than their poorer counterparts.
The study adds to a growing body of evidence that indicates that the rich tend to be less sensitive than others. The mere mention of money makes people less generous, less helpful and less likely to look for teammates, according to research by Kathleen Vohs, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota, cited by The Boston Globe.
In addition, a study by Adam Waytz and Nicholas Epley, professors at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, respectively, found that people with more social connections are more likely to dehumanize others. And a report from researchers at the University of California-Berkeley released in December came to a similar conclusion: That rich people are less likely to feel empathy.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
UrbanBaby asks who's 'rich' -- NO JUDGING!
This is why Republicans still do well at the ballot box. Even the coastal liberal elite won't admit they're rich; meanwhile the poor don't want to seem like "haters" and anyway aspire to be rich... er, solidly upper-middle class, too.
This reminds me of the Bloomberg story from last March about a survey of actual U.S. millionaires by Fidelity Investments. Respondents said they'd need $7.5 million in assets to feel rich. Meanwhile, the average annual gross income in the U.S. is $25,000!
This comment on the original post puts it in perspective: (BOOKLES): "If people with 300k feel poor I may as well get a cup and brush off my guitar and hit the trains. Because begging is my only logical next step. I won't even go into the higher amounts."
You literally have to have a private jet and be able to influence elections to be considered "rich" in America today... And even then if you just act normal you get to enjoy suck-ups breathlessly telling everybody "what a normal guy/gal" you are, like you're doubly blessed by fate for not being an asshole too.
It's like everybody wants to take off their uniforms and pretend to play for the other team. (Sigh) Good ole' class consciousness / class interests / class warfare is much more honest and believable.
And yes, I am judging. There's a whole lot of judging coming from my side.
This is a family of millionaires (Life)
By Jamie Feldmar
January 4, 2012 | Gothamist
With a walloping 46.2 million Americans living in poverty right now, it's the perfect time to start an anonymous internet thread about how much money you make and how it makes you feel, right? No, really: check out this "What's your hhi and do you FEEL poor, middle class, upper middle class or rich where you live. No judging" thread on UrbanBaby, and prepare to feel nauseous inside.
The New Yorker who feels poor on $700,000 a year should probably shack up with the guy who made $2 million and feels middle class, so they can gang up on the Greenwich Village mother who makes $180,000 and feels like "I am doing my child a disservice when she cried at age 4 because I told her we will NEVER buy a country house." Then again, maybe they should all just take advice from the guy who made $13 million, but "FEELS" upper-middle class in New York: "Under 1Bil in savings in NYC, and you cannot buy anything. Rich means being able to influence political contests," he explains. Oh, so that's how it works. No judgement. [via Daily Intel]
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
No debating it: In education, class matters
In statistics, this is a slam-dunk correlation:
Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that more than 40 percent of the variation in average reading scores and 46 percent of the variation in average math scores across states is associated with variation in child poverty rates.
But I know you conservatives and "school choice" folks eschew statistics and prefer anecdotes about that one charter school, or some movie about over-achieving minority students, when it comes to U.S. education policy.
It's too bad our public and private schools don't teach statistics to over-achieving white kids....
By Helen F. Ladd and Edward B. Fiske
December 11, 2011 | New York Times
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Frank Rich: 'Inchoate class war' won't be solved by '12 elections
Many are criticizing OWS for not having a clearer diagnosis of America's problems, and a ready batch of proposed solutions. But that's unfair. The OWS movement was started and continues to be fueled mainly by the young, who can't be expected to know everything. But that doesn't mean they know nothing. Here's their advantage: these young people still retain their acute adolescent sensitivity to unfairness.
For instance, what many of us have come to sigh and take for granted, as just the way of American capitalism -- that big bankers grow rich during the good times, and even richer in bad times -- OWS sees as fundamentally unjust, and a symptom of something deeply wrong with our country. They may not have the experience or erudition to say exactly what is wrong, but they recognize colossal injustice when they see it.
They recognize the unfairness of a system which told them all their lives, "Education is the key to employment and the American dream," and yet they are graduating with huge student loan debt and few job prospects.
They recognize as a baldfaced lie that America is "bankrupt" thanks to "welfare" and therefore cannot offer mortgage relief, student debt relief, invest in infrastructure, or stimulate jobs, and yet America can somehow find $4 trillion for wars in Iraq in Afghanistan, and $16 trillion for bank bailouts (or 111% of U.S. GDP in 2010).
(Indeed, let's pause and remind ourselves that for today's college freshmen, America has been at war half their lives. Since the time they started to perceive the outside world they have known only global terrorism, "the long war," "support our troops," and indefinite U.S. occupation. How that formative experience will affect them throughout their lives no one can tell....)
Pundits like Frank Rich say "the class war has begun." No. It started at least 30 years ago. OWS is just an acknowledgment of hostilities. In their own way the Tea Parties were also an acknowledgment, but they chose to target the wrong elites as Frank Rich points out; or, as I would say, they were right to recognize Washington as the problem, but the TPs were stubbornly blind in ignoring corporate donations and lobbyists as Washington's puppet masters.
OWS may not last through the cold winter, but Americans' "inchoate" class anger isn't going anywhere. The 2012 elections don't promise to resolve anything -- they promise only to be the most depressing political contest in my lifetime. The sad truth is that both Democrat and Republican leaders want OWS to disappear, because that's what their masters want.
And the very classlessness of our society makes the conflict more volatile, not less.
By Frank Rich
October 23, 2011 | New York Magazine
[...]
Try as polite company keeps trying to ignore it, that war has been building in this country and abroad for much of this decade and has been waged in earnest in America since the fall of 2008. But the crisp agenda demanded of Occupy Wall Street will not be forthcoming. The inchoateness of our particular class war is central to its meaning. America is not Tahrir Square or the riot-scarred precincts of North London, where everyone knows at birth who is in which class and why. We pride ourselves on being a "classless" democracy. We abhor ideology. When Americans left and right, young and old, express anger at an overclass, they don't necessarily agree about who's on which side of that class divide. The often confusing fluidity of class definitions, especially in an America as polarized as ours is now, may make our homegrown class war more volatile, not less.
[...]
Back in 1931, even Hoover worried that "timid people, black with despair" had "lost faith in the American system" and might be susceptible to the kind of revolutions that had become a spreading peril abroad. When Roosevelt took office, he had the confidence that his leadership could overcome that level of despair and head off radicals on the left or right. In 2011, the despair is again black, and faith in the system is shaky, but it would be hard to describe the atmosphere at Zuccotti Park or a tea-party rally as prerevolutionary. The anger of the class war across the spectrum seems fatalistic more than incendiary. No wonder. Everyone just assumes the fix is in for the highest bidder, no matter what. Take—please!—the latest bipartisan Beltway panacea: the congressional supercommittee charged by the president and GOP leaders to hammer out the deficit-reduction compromise they couldn't do on their own. The Washington Post recently discovered that nearly 100 of the registered lobbyists no doubt charged with besieging the committee to protect the interests of the financial, defense, and health-care industries are former employees of its dozen members. Indeed, six of those members (three from each party) currently have former lobbyists on their staffs.
[...]
Elections are supposed to resolve conflicts in a great democracy, but our next one will not. The elites will face off against the elites to a standoff, and the issues animating the class war in both parties won't even be on the table. The structural crises in our economy, our government, and our culture defy any of the glib solutions proposed by current Democrats or Republicans; the quixotic third-party movements being hatched by well-heeled do-gooders are vanity productions. The two powerful forces that extricated America from the Great Depression—the courageous leadership and reformist zeal of Roosevelt, the mobilization for World War II—are not on offer this time. Our class war will rage on without winners indefinitely, with all sides stewing in their own juices, until—when? No one knows. The reckoning with capitalism's failures over the past three decades, both in America and the globe beyond, may well be on hold until the top one percent becomes persuaded that its own economic fate is tied to the other 99 percent's. Which is to say things may have to get worse before they get better.
Over the short term, meanwhile, the Democratic Establishment is no doubt wishing that Occupy Wall Street will melt away with the winter snows, much as its Republican counterpart hopes that the leaderless tea party will wither if Romney nails down the nomination. But even in the unlikely event that these wishes come true, it is not likely to be the end of the story. Though the Bonus Army was driven out of Washington in the similarly fraught election year of 1932, the newsreels they left behind turned out to be previews of coming attractions for the long decade still to come.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
NYC-union 'snowjob' hoax a salvo in conservative class war
On Friday I heard a Wall Street guy from NYC cite the now debunked union-"silent strike" story as fact for all us non-New Yorkers in the room.
Man, lying really works well!
As Alterman points out, if enough Americans believe that public employees are all lazy, cheating slobs, then it won't be hard for conservative politicians to cut their wages, and do things like allow states to declare bankruptcy in order to cancel their pension obligations to public employees.
By Eric Alterman
February 3, 2011 | The Nation
Friday, January 7, 2011
Reich: Anti-union rhetoric is class warfare
Great points by Reich. I would add only two things. First, if you want to cut salaries and benefits of public employees, then get ready to receive worse public services. That is, if you want to pay them like fry cooks at McDonald's, then that's the calibre of employee you're going to get. This truth should be self-evident to "free-market" types who believe that people respond to incentives.
Second, it's also self-evident that some people make the rational choice to forgo a higher salary in the private sector in exchange for greater job security and a secure pension (or any kind of pension, nowadays) in the public sector. That is, if public-sector jobs were as low-paying and insecure as private-sector jobs, there would be little or no incentive for people to man our gov't bureaucracy. Going down that path, we'd end up lowering standards and hiring fry cooks simply to staff our gov't agencies.
By Robert Reich
January 5, 2011 | Huffington Post
January 5, 2011 | Huffington Post
In 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life. Eventually Memphis heard the grievances of its sanitation workers. And in subsequent years millions of public employees across the nation have benefited from the job protections they've earned.
But now the right is going after public employees.
Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don't want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they'd like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.
It's far more convenient to go after people who are doing the public's work -- sanitation workers, police officers, fire fighters, teachers, social workers, federal employees -- to call them "faceless bureaucrats" and portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling federal and state budgets. The story fits better with the Republican's Big Lie that our problems are due to a government that's too big.
Above all, Republicans don't want to have to justify continued tax cuts for the rich. As quietly as possible, they want to make them permanent.
But the right's argument is shot-through with bad data, twisted evidence, and unsupported assertions.
They say public employees earn far more than private-sector workers. That's untrue when you take account of level of education. Matched by education, public sector workers actually earn less than their private-sector counterparts.
The Republican trick is to compare apples with oranges -- the average wage of public employees with the average wage of all private-sector employees. But only 23 percent of private-sector employees have college degrees; 48 percent of government workers do. Teachers, social workers, public lawyers who bring companies to justice, government accountants who try to make sure money is spent as it should be -- all need at least four years of college.
Compare apples to apples and and you'd see that over the last fifteen years the pay of public sector workers has dropped relative to private-sector employees with the same level of education. Public sector workers now earn 11 percent less than comparable workers in the private sector, and local workers 12 percent less. (Even if you include health and retirement benefits, government employees still earn less than their private-sector counterparts with similar educations.)
Here's another whopper. Republicans say public-sector pensions are crippling the nation. They say politicians have given in to the demands of public unions who want only to fatten their members' retirement benefits without the public noticing. They charge that public-employee pensions obligations are out of control.
Some reforms do need to be made. Loopholes that allow public sector workers to "spike" their final salaries in order to get higher annuities must be closed. And no retired public employee should be allowed to "double dip," collecting more than one public pension.
But these are the exceptions. Most public employees don't have generous pensions. After a career with annual pay averaging less than $45,000, the typical newly-retired public employee receives a pension of $19,000 a year. Few would call that overly generous.
And most of that $19,000 isn't even on taxpayers' shoulders. While they're working, most public employees contribute a portion of their salaries into their pension plans. Taxpayers are directly responsible for only about 14 percent of public retirement benefits. Remember also that many public workers aren't covered by Social Security, so the government isn't contributing 6.25 of their pay into the Social Security fund as private employers would.
Yes, there's cause for concern about unfunded pension liabilities in future years. They're way too big. But it's much the same in the private sector. The main reason for underfunded pensions in both public and private sectors is investment losses that occurred during the Great Recession. Before then, public pension funds had an average of 86 percent of all the assets they needed to pay future benefits -- better than many private pension plans.
The solution is no less to slash public pensions than it is to slash private ones. It's for all employers to fully fund their pension plans.
The final Republican canard is that bargaining rights for public employees have caused state deficits to explode. In fact there's no relationship between states whose employees have bargaining rights and states with big deficits. Some states that deny their employees bargaining rights -- Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona, for example, are running giant deficits of over 30 percent of spending. Many that give employees bargaining rights -- Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Montana -- have small deficits of less than 10 percent.
Public employees should have the right to bargain for better wages and working conditions, just like all employees do. They shouldn't have the right to strike if striking would imperil the public, but they should at least have a voice. They often know more about whether public programs are working, or how to make them work better, than political appointees who hold their offices for only a few years.
Don't get me wrong. When times are tough, public employees should have to make the same sacrifices as everyone else. And they are right now. Pay has been frozen for federal workers, and for many state workers across the country as well.
But isn't it curious that when it comes to sacrifice, Republicans don't include the richest people in America? To the contrary, they insist the rich should sacrifice even less, enjoying even larger tax cuts that expand public-sector deficits. That means fewer public services, and even more pressure on the wages and benefits of public employees.
It's only average workers -- both in the public and the private sectors -- who are being called upon to sacrifice.
This is what the current Republican attack on public-sector workers is really all about. Their version of class warfare is to pit private-sector workers against public servants. They'd rather set average working people against one another -- comparing one group's modest incomes and benefits with another group's modest incomes and benefits -- than have Americans see that the top 1 percent is now raking in a bigger share of national income than at any time since 1928, and paying at a lower tax rate. And Republicans would rather you didn't know they want to cut taxes on the rich even more.
This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Liberals must focus on opportunity, not inequality
Kind of a long article, and I can agree with much of it. And granted, class envy is not a very useful or uplifting emotion. But Conley misses one very big point: We have a national debt that needs to be reduced. Unless we cut spending drastically, those additional tax dollars have to come from somewhere. Indeed, to fund all these "investments" in helping people become more productive (a very Clintonian term for spending gov't money), we need additional tax dollars to start with. Where are those tax dollars going to come from? From the millionaires and billionaires, where else?
His idea about making Congress bigger, i.e. making more, smaller districts, is very interesting though. I didn't realize that was possible within the bounds of the Constitution. Would it indeed really make politics more local and responsive? Or would it make politicians easier for campaign donors to buy off?
Don't Blame the Billionaires
By Dalton Conley
December 15, 2009 | American Prospect
When I was growing up, my mother used to sing me the old adage, "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer," before hastening to add, "And it's all Ronald Reagan's fault." Because I had campaigned for Jimmy Carter as a wide-eyed 11-year-old, this was one of the few maternal claims that I did not dispute in my adolescence.
In decrying the rising inequality of the 1980s, my mother was speaking from a long tradition, extending back at least a century, of progressives shaking their fists at economic disparities. During the 1970s, just as the midcentury compression of economic difference was ending, philosophers and social scientists were becoming concerned with the issue. In 1971, philosopher John Rawls penned A Theory of Justice, his magnum opus arguing that social policy should be based on the imperative to narrow the difference between the welfare of the most and the least well-off in society. The following year, sociologist Christopher Jencks and his colleagues authored a book titled Inequality, in which they argued that attempting to promote the American dream of economic mobility was futile and that if we were truly concerned with equal opportunity, the only real solution was to lessen inequality.
Maybe it was rapidly rising living standards that stimulated such interest in the issue of inequality back then. Like environmentalism, worries about inequality are a luxury that folks seem to indulge in when they are flush. When times are hard -- like now -- families are too worried about their own finances to be concerned about how the Joneses are doing. One study shows that while for Europeans, inequality truly makes them less happy, in the United States only the moods of rich leftists are adversely affected.
My mother was, in fact, only half correct when she quoted the old saying about income polarization. In the United States, the family that is richer than 90 percent of Americans reaps incomes that are between five and six times larger than the family that is better off than only the bottom 10 percent. (In Sweden the rich are about 2.5 times wealthier than the poor; in the Netherlands they are about three times wealthier; and in Great Britain they are approximately 4.5 times wealthier.) If we stop here, we might conclude that my mother was right about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
But the truth is that the rich have gotten richer, full stop. If we break down this 90-to-10 ratio into two parts -- how the top is doing relative to the middle and how the middle is doing relative to the poor -- we find that the growth in inequality has been almost all concentrated in how much better the top percentiles are doing than the middle. The poor have for the most part kept pace with the middle class (whose incomes have been fairly stagnant), but both those groups have watched their proportional share of national wealth dwindle as the upper end has broken records for income growth. However, the rising share of national wealth held by the richest 10 percent of Americans has recently hit a wall and declined from the 2007 peak (which matched the 1929 peak). But should my mother cheer this news? Are we better off? It's the fate of the middle and lower classes that should concern progressives, not how many private jets the super rich can afford.
As for blaming Reagan? As much as liberals would like to think so, rising inequality is not his fault. It's not even George W. Bush's fault. Nor is it his father's fault. The sharpest rise, in fact, occurred on Carter's watch. Much more important are factors well beyond the control of politicians: globalization, immigration, demographic shifts, and changeover to a knowledge economy.
Inequality -- and its consequences -- is the wrong target. It's time for progressives to spend less time trying to prove the effects of inequality on health, growth, and politics and instead start focusing on opportunity for those shut out entirely.
***
For liberals, it is self-evident that inequality has bad consequences for society as a whole, from health to the economy. Meanwhile, since the Scottish Enlightenment conservatives have argued that inequality is the engine of progress: Differential rewards lead to ingenuity, industriousness, and innovation. But social scientists have long struggled to determine the effects of inequality because it is impossible to study in any systematic way. We can't do experiments to assign some communities to enjoy (or endure) greater equality than others. In lieu of some grand economic experiment, many scholars have focused on comparisons over time and across places.
A few years ago, there seemed to have emerged a cottage industry on the deleterious effects of economic inequality on health. While it has long been established that there is a class gradient in health -- poorer folks are typically less healthy than the well-to-do -- it has been much more difficult to resolve why this is so and whether the degree of societal inequality itself has an effect on health. The "weak" case is that it's worse for your health and longevity to be poor in a society where the rich are really rich; the "strong" case is that even if you are rich, equality is better for your health.
Early research found that folks in more equal Sweden and the Netherlands were healthier than we here in the United States and our Anglo brethren in the United Kingdom and Australia where inequality is higher. However, the easy rejoinder is that whatever it is that produces that equality -- racial homogeneity, culture, powerful trade unions -- is also causing health. To get around this, researchers have used comparisons over time within countries, but it's not like inequality is driven up and down randomly like the weather. So whatever is affecting the level of economic differentiation could also be affecting health, whether that's government policy, immigration, or fertility.
Other studies have shown that U.S. states with more inequality are less likely to be healthy. But what really makes the difference between states are policy differences -- like minimum wages, welfare rules, ease of divorce, and speed limits -- which suggests that, like countries, whatever states do to produce equality also produces population health; equality itself does not produce better health. To tackle this possibility, other researchers have delved into ever more local levels -- metropolitan areas, counties, even Census tracts. But there is always an alternative explanation. Even unequal neighborhoods tend to differ from more equal communities in terms of their real-estate trajectories, school taxes, and so on.
The cottage industry of inequality-health studies was stopped in its tracks (or should have been) in 2002, when a couple of economists, Jennifer Mellor and Jeffrey Milyo, showed that inequality is not causally related to the health of a population, although individual incomes are related to individual health. Being poor is bad for your health for a whole host of reasons ranging from lack of adequate preventative and curative care to stress to bad behavioral choices, but being unhealthy has nothing to do with other people's incomes.
That diagnosis calls for a different policy prescription than the inequality-health link does: increasing economic growth and opportunity at the bottom.
***
This brings us back to where we started. Is there a trade-off between equity and growth as most traditional economic models suggest? Or are they complements, as economist Paul Krugman argues when he links the Great Compression (the post?World War II dip in inequality) to the robust middle-class growth of the period?
Conservatives have taken it as an article of faith that high capital-gains tax rates and a progressive income-tax erode the incentive for the rich to do good with their money (start businesses, invest, or donate), while shoring up the bottom end of the income distribution softens the need to work. What's more, taxes, even redistributive ones, cause a deadweight loss for the economy as a whole. In other words, government policies that reduce inequality slow the growth of productivity.
It is indeed feasible to claim that a generous dole blunts the need or desire to drag oneself out of bed to clock in at a low-wage job. However, the claim that higher marginal tax rates or corporate levies slow growth through decreasing incentives to innovate and invest is quite controversial, to say the least. The rich can only consume so much. They could invest elsewhere if marginal tax rates were lower, but offshore tax havens aside, ultimately they have to pay Uncle Sam. Besides, most of the developed world is less pro-business than we are. And the developing world already has enough to offer with its supply of cheap labor.
[In other words, other than spending it, the rich have to do something with their money, i.e. invest it. "But," some conservatives will argue, "High taxes discourage people from becoming rich." I'd like to see some data to prove that. I'm really very skeptical about that argument. I have a hard time believing that somebody who is motivated by a desire for money would think to himself, "Oh, well, I could make even more money by risking and working hard if taxes were lower, so I'm not even going to try." - J]
The debate about the economic incentives of progressive taxation and direct effects of inequality on growth is really beside the point, anyway. How we spend revenue is much more important than how we raise it. Investments in research and development, infrastructure, and other public goods with high returns are likely to lead to increased economic development. It's also probably fair to say that taxation that leads to consumption or waste is a huge drag.
What's up for debate is the vast middle ground: Do investments in health care or education also generate economic growth? Certainly progressives have a strong case when arguing that a healthy, well-educated population pays for itself in the long run. But that calls for an opportunity agenda -- -preventative health care, oral health, clean air, education from early childhood on through post-secondary schooling -- not a focus on ending inequality. These are just a few of the investments we can make whose efficacy and value are backed by good social-science evidence.
Even given the recent economic slump, America is quite a wealthy nation. Back in the 1930s, inequality was still just beginning to decline from its 1929 peak, but Hoovervilles were erected because people needed to eat. Today -- barring a recurrence of the Dust Bowl thanks to global climate change -- most of us will not suffer from material hardship in the way that our grandparents may have. There is enough shelter in America. Almost everyone has access to clean drinking water and electricity. There is enough (or even too much) food.
In other words, today's crisis is not a productivity problem. All the same, the demands upon the social contract in an affluent, unequal society are all the more impossible to satisfy. That's because with our basic needs satisfied, our aspirations turn to relative desires -- which by their definition cannot come true for all. The major sources of economic anxiety today relate to goods and services that often convey status distinctions. There's the $5,000 gas grill, which is an example often used by economist Robert Frank (who addressed this issue in the Prospect's April 2009 cover story, "Post-Consumer Prosperity"). More consequentially, there's housing and college tuition.
So if we are not willing or able as a society to rein in economic inequality, then one alternative model aims to make socioeconomic disparities less important by ensuring that a basic, high-quality floor of opportunity is available in areas such as housing and education.
***
We could choose to do nothing about inequality. After all, the yawning gap between rich and poor has not led to protest marches. It doesn't appear to be causing bread shortages. And it's highly debatable whether it has any effect on our physical or mental well-being. But economic inequality does not exist in isolation: The elite also wield disproportionate influence on the political process. Where money intersects politics, inequality perverts democracy -- and by extension, the public interest.
The lion's share of attention about the corrupting effects of inequality on politics has been focused on issues like campaign donations that grant plutocrats access to politicians. But big money tends to find another way to keep flowing once we put the public thumb over a given spigot, whether through campaign-finance reform or lobbying bans for ex-government workers. [We've done a very half-hearted job of "reforming" both problems. I'm not buying into Conley's fatalism. - J] Sometimes combating the negative effects of inequality requires thinking politics rather than economics. One way to fix a political system that kowtows to rich donors at the expense of the public good is to amplify the power of small donors who came out in record numbers during the last election. Many localities, such as New York City, already do this through very generous matches on the order of 6-to-1.
Or we could bring back old-fashioned shoe-leather politics by making districts much more local. Today, the average congressperson speaks for about 700,000 Americans. Back in 1790, the ratio was a mere 60,000-to-1. In 1913, it was roughly 200,000-to-1. If we were to restore that proportionality of representation, campaigns would be cheaper, the political value of donations would greatly decrease, and the salience of grass-roots campaigning would rise dramatically. In proposing such a reform, political scientist Jacqueline Stevens points out that nothing in the Constitution stops us from increasing the ranks of Congress as long as each member speaks for at least 30,000 people.
Nowhere is the linkage between inequality and political power starker than in the realm of finance -- now one-fifth of the nation's gross domestic product. The so-called regulators have been totally captured by the regulated, and the notion of the free market has become risible in the very geographic center of global capitalism. Hence the unusual alliance between the far left and the far right in opposing last year's bank bailout. Even if very few voters actually comprehend the messy details of the greatest political sweindle in history, at least the public smells something fishy on Wall Street.
The answer, then, is to not decry inequality in and of itself. That's a losing proposition in the United States. Anyway, it distracts from the real issue: opportunity. Whether that's the inadequate health care that the poor disproportionately receive, the dearth of human capital investment at the bottom, or the lack of political voice that most of us have, the game itself is hardly fair in America. Overhauling this rigged system -- not decrying its winners -- is a much more effective (and politically wise) strategy to ensure a prosperous and just society for all.
In essence, I am arguing for exactly the opposite of what Christopher Jencks advocated in Inequality 37 years ago. Whereas he and his co-authors ultimately resigned themselves to unequal pathways and thus focused on relative shares of the pie, instead, I maintain that inequality is epiphenomenal as long as we focus on maximizing opportunity for all. Let's worry about making sure the circuitry of the American dream isn't shorted, rather than whether some folks draw more current from the grid.
Dalton Conley is university professor and dean for the social sciences at New York University. He is author of Elsewhere U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety.
His idea about making Congress bigger, i.e. making more, smaller districts, is very interesting though. I didn't realize that was possible within the bounds of the Constitution. Would it indeed really make politics more local and responsive? Or would it make politicians easier for campaign donors to buy off?
Don't Blame the Billionaires
By Dalton Conley
December 15, 2009 | American Prospect
When I was growing up, my mother used to sing me the old adage, "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer," before hastening to add, "And it's all Ronald Reagan's fault." Because I had campaigned for Jimmy Carter as a wide-eyed 11-year-old, this was one of the few maternal claims that I did not dispute in my adolescence.
In decrying the rising inequality of the 1980s, my mother was speaking from a long tradition, extending back at least a century, of progressives shaking their fists at economic disparities. During the 1970s, just as the midcentury compression of economic difference was ending, philosophers and social scientists were becoming concerned with the issue. In 1971, philosopher John Rawls penned A Theory of Justice, his magnum opus arguing that social policy should be based on the imperative to narrow the difference between the welfare of the most and the least well-off in society. The following year, sociologist Christopher Jencks and his colleagues authored a book titled Inequality, in which they argued that attempting to promote the American dream of economic mobility was futile and that if we were truly concerned with equal opportunity, the only real solution was to lessen inequality.
Maybe it was rapidly rising living standards that stimulated such interest in the issue of inequality back then. Like environmentalism, worries about inequality are a luxury that folks seem to indulge in when they are flush. When times are hard -- like now -- families are too worried about their own finances to be concerned about how the Joneses are doing. One study shows that while for Europeans, inequality truly makes them less happy, in the United States only the moods of rich leftists are adversely affected.
My mother was, in fact, only half correct when she quoted the old saying about income polarization. In the United States, the family that is richer than 90 percent of Americans reaps incomes that are between five and six times larger than the family that is better off than only the bottom 10 percent. (In Sweden the rich are about 2.5 times wealthier than the poor; in the Netherlands they are about three times wealthier; and in Great Britain they are approximately 4.5 times wealthier.) If we stop here, we might conclude that my mother was right about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
But the truth is that the rich have gotten richer, full stop. If we break down this 90-to-10 ratio into two parts -- how the top is doing relative to the middle and how the middle is doing relative to the poor -- we find that the growth in inequality has been almost all concentrated in how much better the top percentiles are doing than the middle. The poor have for the most part kept pace with the middle class (whose incomes have been fairly stagnant), but both those groups have watched their proportional share of national wealth dwindle as the upper end has broken records for income growth. However, the rising share of national wealth held by the richest 10 percent of Americans has recently hit a wall and declined from the 2007 peak (which matched the 1929 peak). But should my mother cheer this news? Are we better off? It's the fate of the middle and lower classes that should concern progressives, not how many private jets the super rich can afford.
As for blaming Reagan? As much as liberals would like to think so, rising inequality is not his fault. It's not even George W. Bush's fault. Nor is it his father's fault. The sharpest rise, in fact, occurred on Carter's watch. Much more important are factors well beyond the control of politicians: globalization, immigration, demographic shifts, and changeover to a knowledge economy.
Inequality -- and its consequences -- is the wrong target. It's time for progressives to spend less time trying to prove the effects of inequality on health, growth, and politics and instead start focusing on opportunity for those shut out entirely.
***
For liberals, it is self-evident that inequality has bad consequences for society as a whole, from health to the economy. Meanwhile, since the Scottish Enlightenment conservatives have argued that inequality is the engine of progress: Differential rewards lead to ingenuity, industriousness, and innovation. But social scientists have long struggled to determine the effects of inequality because it is impossible to study in any systematic way. We can't do experiments to assign some communities to enjoy (or endure) greater equality than others. In lieu of some grand economic experiment, many scholars have focused on comparisons over time and across places.
A few years ago, there seemed to have emerged a cottage industry on the deleterious effects of economic inequality on health. While it has long been established that there is a class gradient in health -- poorer folks are typically less healthy than the well-to-do -- it has been much more difficult to resolve why this is so and whether the degree of societal inequality itself has an effect on health. The "weak" case is that it's worse for your health and longevity to be poor in a society where the rich are really rich; the "strong" case is that even if you are rich, equality is better for your health.
Early research found that folks in more equal Sweden and the Netherlands were healthier than we here in the United States and our Anglo brethren in the United Kingdom and Australia where inequality is higher. However, the easy rejoinder is that whatever it is that produces that equality -- racial homogeneity, culture, powerful trade unions -- is also causing health. To get around this, researchers have used comparisons over time within countries, but it's not like inequality is driven up and down randomly like the weather. So whatever is affecting the level of economic differentiation could also be affecting health, whether that's government policy, immigration, or fertility.
Other studies have shown that U.S. states with more inequality are less likely to be healthy. But what really makes the difference between states are policy differences -- like minimum wages, welfare rules, ease of divorce, and speed limits -- which suggests that, like countries, whatever states do to produce equality also produces population health; equality itself does not produce better health. To tackle this possibility, other researchers have delved into ever more local levels -- metropolitan areas, counties, even Census tracts. But there is always an alternative explanation. Even unequal neighborhoods tend to differ from more equal communities in terms of their real-estate trajectories, school taxes, and so on.
The cottage industry of inequality-health studies was stopped in its tracks (or should have been) in 2002, when a couple of economists, Jennifer Mellor and Jeffrey Milyo, showed that inequality is not causally related to the health of a population, although individual incomes are related to individual health. Being poor is bad for your health for a whole host of reasons ranging from lack of adequate preventative and curative care to stress to bad behavioral choices, but being unhealthy has nothing to do with other people's incomes.
That diagnosis calls for a different policy prescription than the inequality-health link does: increasing economic growth and opportunity at the bottom.
***
This brings us back to where we started. Is there a trade-off between equity and growth as most traditional economic models suggest? Or are they complements, as economist Paul Krugman argues when he links the Great Compression (the post?World War II dip in inequality) to the robust middle-class growth of the period?
Conservatives have taken it as an article of faith that high capital-gains tax rates and a progressive income-tax erode the incentive for the rich to do good with their money (start businesses, invest, or donate), while shoring up the bottom end of the income distribution softens the need to work. What's more, taxes, even redistributive ones, cause a deadweight loss for the economy as a whole. In other words, government policies that reduce inequality slow the growth of productivity.
It is indeed feasible to claim that a generous dole blunts the need or desire to drag oneself out of bed to clock in at a low-wage job. However, the claim that higher marginal tax rates or corporate levies slow growth through decreasing incentives to innovate and invest is quite controversial, to say the least. The rich can only consume so much. They could invest elsewhere if marginal tax rates were lower, but offshore tax havens aside, ultimately they have to pay Uncle Sam. Besides, most of the developed world is less pro-business than we are. And the developing world already has enough to offer with its supply of cheap labor.
[In other words, other than spending it, the rich have to do something with their money, i.e. invest it. "But," some conservatives will argue, "High taxes discourage people from becoming rich." I'd like to see some data to prove that. I'm really very skeptical about that argument. I have a hard time believing that somebody who is motivated by a desire for money would think to himself, "Oh, well, I could make even more money by risking and working hard if taxes were lower, so I'm not even going to try." - J]
The debate about the economic incentives of progressive taxation and direct effects of inequality on growth is really beside the point, anyway. How we spend revenue is much more important than how we raise it. Investments in research and development, infrastructure, and other public goods with high returns are likely to lead to increased economic development. It's also probably fair to say that taxation that leads to consumption or waste is a huge drag.
What's up for debate is the vast middle ground: Do investments in health care or education also generate economic growth? Certainly progressives have a strong case when arguing that a healthy, well-educated population pays for itself in the long run. But that calls for an opportunity agenda -- -preventative health care, oral health, clean air, education from early childhood on through post-secondary schooling -- not a focus on ending inequality. These are just a few of the investments we can make whose efficacy and value are backed by good social-science evidence.
Even given the recent economic slump, America is quite a wealthy nation. Back in the 1930s, inequality was still just beginning to decline from its 1929 peak, but Hoovervilles were erected because people needed to eat. Today -- barring a recurrence of the Dust Bowl thanks to global climate change -- most of us will not suffer from material hardship in the way that our grandparents may have. There is enough shelter in America. Almost everyone has access to clean drinking water and electricity. There is enough (or even too much) food.
In other words, today's crisis is not a productivity problem. All the same, the demands upon the social contract in an affluent, unequal society are all the more impossible to satisfy. That's because with our basic needs satisfied, our aspirations turn to relative desires -- which by their definition cannot come true for all. The major sources of economic anxiety today relate to goods and services that often convey status distinctions. There's the $5,000 gas grill, which is an example often used by economist Robert Frank (who addressed this issue in the Prospect's April 2009 cover story, "Post-Consumer Prosperity"). More consequentially, there's housing and college tuition.
So if we are not willing or able as a society to rein in economic inequality, then one alternative model aims to make socioeconomic disparities less important by ensuring that a basic, high-quality floor of opportunity is available in areas such as housing and education.
***
We could choose to do nothing about inequality. After all, the yawning gap between rich and poor has not led to protest marches. It doesn't appear to be causing bread shortages. And it's highly debatable whether it has any effect on our physical or mental well-being. But economic inequality does not exist in isolation: The elite also wield disproportionate influence on the political process. Where money intersects politics, inequality perverts democracy -- and by extension, the public interest.
The lion's share of attention about the corrupting effects of inequality on politics has been focused on issues like campaign donations that grant plutocrats access to politicians. But big money tends to find another way to keep flowing once we put the public thumb over a given spigot, whether through campaign-finance reform or lobbying bans for ex-government workers. [We've done a very half-hearted job of "reforming" both problems. I'm not buying into Conley's fatalism. - J] Sometimes combating the negative effects of inequality requires thinking politics rather than economics. One way to fix a political system that kowtows to rich donors at the expense of the public good is to amplify the power of small donors who came out in record numbers during the last election. Many localities, such as New York City, already do this through very generous matches on the order of 6-to-1.
Or we could bring back old-fashioned shoe-leather politics by making districts much more local. Today, the average congressperson speaks for about 700,000 Americans. Back in 1790, the ratio was a mere 60,000-to-1. In 1913, it was roughly 200,000-to-1. If we were to restore that proportionality of representation, campaigns would be cheaper, the political value of donations would greatly decrease, and the salience of grass-roots campaigning would rise dramatically. In proposing such a reform, political scientist Jacqueline Stevens points out that nothing in the Constitution stops us from increasing the ranks of Congress as long as each member speaks for at least 30,000 people.
Nowhere is the linkage between inequality and political power starker than in the realm of finance -- now one-fifth of the nation's gross domestic product. The so-called regulators have been totally captured by the regulated, and the notion of the free market has become risible in the very geographic center of global capitalism. Hence the unusual alliance between the far left and the far right in opposing last year's bank bailout. Even if very few voters actually comprehend the messy details of the greatest political sweindle in history, at least the public smells something fishy on Wall Street.
The answer, then, is to not decry inequality in and of itself. That's a losing proposition in the United States. Anyway, it distracts from the real issue: opportunity. Whether that's the inadequate health care that the poor disproportionately receive, the dearth of human capital investment at the bottom, or the lack of political voice that most of us have, the game itself is hardly fair in America. Overhauling this rigged system -- not decrying its winners -- is a much more effective (and politically wise) strategy to ensure a prosperous and just society for all.
In essence, I am arguing for exactly the opposite of what Christopher Jencks advocated in Inequality 37 years ago. Whereas he and his co-authors ultimately resigned themselves to unequal pathways and thus focused on relative shares of the pie, instead, I maintain that inequality is epiphenomenal as long as we focus on maximizing opportunity for all. Let's worry about making sure the circuitry of the American dream isn't shorted, rather than whether some folks draw more current from the grid.
Dalton Conley is university professor and dean for the social sciences at New York University. He is author of Elsewhere U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety.
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