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“Restoring Economic Mobility”: A Challenge To Conservatives

It’s good that conservatives are finally taking seriously the problems of inequality and declining upward mobility. It’s unfortunate that they often evade the ways in which structural changes in the economy, combined with conservative policies, have made matters worse.

Occupy Wall Street, whatever its future, will always merit praise for placing inequality at the center of our politics. The biggest sign of the Occupiers’ success: Conservatives once stubbornly insisted that inequality wasn’t a problem because the United States was the land of opportunity and upward mobility. Now they are facing the fact that we are by no means the most socially mobile country in the world.

Reports from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and others show that social mobility is greater elsewhere, notably in Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden and Germany.

What do these countries have in common? Not to put too fine a point on it, all have national policies that are, in right-wing parlance, more “socialist” or (to be precise) social democratic than ours. They guarantee their citizens health insurance. They have stronger union movements and more generous welfare states. They tend to keep higher education more affordable. In most cases, especially Germany’s, they have robust apprenticeship and job training programs. They levy higher taxes.

The lesson from this list is not that cutting back government, gutting unions and reducing taxes on the rich will re-create an America of opportunity. On the contrary, we need more active and thoughtful government policies to become again the nation we claim to be.

We also need to be more candid about the large forces that are buffeting the American middle class. Writing in The Nation about Timothy Noah’s excellent new book, “The Great Divergence,” William Julius Wilson, the distinguished Harvard sociologist, nicely summarized the factors Noah sees as explaining rising disparities of wealth and income.

They included “the increasing importance of a college degree due to the shortage of better-educated workers; trade between the United States and low-wage nations; changes in government policy in labor and finance; and the decline of the labor movement. He also considers the extreme changes in the wage structure of corporations and the financial industry, in which American CEOs typically receive three times the salaries earned by their European counterparts.”

Most conservatives accept the importance of education but then choose to ignore all the other forces Noah describes.

Recently, my friends David Brooks and Michael Gerson used their columns to address the decline in mobility. It’s to the credit of these two conservatives that they did so, yet both found ways of downplaying the challenge inequality poses to conservatism itself.

Brooks cited a fine study by Robert Putnam, also a Harvard scholar, noting that the different parenting styles of the upper middle class and the working class are aggravating inequalities. Brooks’s conclusion: “Liberals are going to have to be willing to champion norms that say marriage should come before child-rearing and be morally tough about it. Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept tax increases or benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class.”

Yes, parenting (including the time crunch that two- or three-income working-class families face) is part of the issue, which is why I also admire Putnam’s study. But the balance in Brooks’s call to arms is entirely false. It’s not 1969 anymore. Progressives — including Wilson, Barack Obama and, if I may say so, yours truly — have been talking about the importance of family breakdown for decades. Brooks rightly acknowledges the need for measures to help those skidding down the class structure. The barrier here is not liberal attitudes toward the family but conservative attitudes toward government.

Gerson also said sensible things about promoting a “broad diffusion of skills and social capital” but then closed by accusing liberals of wanting to “soak the rich” and insisting that “economic redistribution is not the answer.”

Actually, liberals are not for “soaking the rich,” unless you consider the Clinton-era tax rates some kind of socialist bath. And as the experience of the more social democratic countries shows, a modest amount of “economic redistribution” — to offset the radical redistribution toward the very rich of recent decades — can begin the process of restoring the kind of mobility we once bragged about.

My challenge to conservatives worried about inequality is to follow the logic of their concern to what may be some uncomfortable conclusions, especially in an election year.

 

By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 15, 2012

July 17, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Unraveling”: Republican Drooling, Stupid, Transparent, Self Conscious Lying

One of the habits of political spinmeisters that I dislike the most is the tendency to claim that close contests are invariably about to break wide open into a complete debacle, a historic humiliation, a defeat of biblical proportions for their opponent. I don’t know what this sort of stupid, transparent, self-conscious lying is supposed to accomplish. Intimidation? Exciting “the base?” Discouraging the other “team’s” “base?” Working the refs? Beats me.

In any event, we’re getting a lot of this right now from the Romney campaign and its supporters. Here’s an item from The Hill:

A top Romney spokeswoman said the Obama campaign’s allegations that he misled the public over his tenure at Bain Capital are “reckless and wild,” and a sign that the president’s campaign is “unraveling.”

And here’s a post from Michael Walsh at The Corner:

The Obama campaign’s desperate “felony” charge against Mitt Romney ought to serve as a wake-up call for the Romney campaign and for the American public regarding the utter amorality of the president and his functionaries.

Neither of these excited people is offering any rationale for why the Obama campaign should be feeling “reckless and wild” or “desperate,” or should be “unraveling.” Well, actually, the Romney staffer in the Hill story, Gail Gitcho, offered this drooling bit of spin that wouldn’t fool a first grader:

[T]his attack from yesterday has frankly just jumped the shark and it shows that the Obama campaign, they are scared to death of having to run on their own record because they haven’t been able to create jobs and they have no plans in the future to be able to fix the economy, and that’s what the American people care about.”

That, BTW, is an excellent example of another spinmestier habit I absolutely hate, which is making generalizations about what “the American people” think or want.

But anyway, why would anyone actually think the Obama campaign is in extremis right now? Every time I turn around there’s another article about the incredible stability of the polls of this contest, and their utter imperviousness to the events of the campaign. The electorate is so polarized that Obama couldn’t drop to more than a few points behind Romney even if he suddenly came out and said his favorite writer was Frantz Fanon. The actual outcome is likely going to depend on GOTV efforts that aren’t even underway yet. So what, pray tell, is the point of the constant claims that Obama’s panicking or is going to lose as badly as Mondale or has been “rejected by the American people?” Will this change a single vote? I can’t imagine why.

What “the American people” really need are spinmeisters who are a little less shameless.

 

By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 13, 2012

July 16, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Reek Of Entitlement”: The GOP Only Represents The Super-Rich

“Too much money” sounds like an oxymoron, especially when applied to American politics. But in the last week, Republicans are beginning to learn that lots of money can have its downside. Thursday’s story that Romney may have actively directed Bain Capital three years longer than he claimed – a period in which Bain Capital-managed companies experienced bankruptcies and layoffs – caps what must be the worst weekly news cycle of any modern American presidential candidate. From images of corporate raiding, to luxury speedboats, to offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands, to mega-mansions in the Hamptons, this week’s stories suggest that the candidacy of Mitt Romney – poster-boy for the symbiotic relationship between big money and the modern Republican party – is in serious trouble.

Last weekend’s photos of the Romney clan on a luxury speedboat cruising around a lake in New Hampshire, where their multimillion-dollar compound sits, were startling in their tone-deafness. And just to make sure the sentiment wasn’t lost on anyone, at a campaign event the same week, Obama recounted childhood memories of touring the US with his grandmother by Greyhound bus, even the thrill of staying at a Howard Johnson motel. In a smart political calculation, the Obamas chose to forgo their annual summer vacation in Cape Cod (a nice upper-middle class vacation spot, mind you, but nowhere near the same league as the Romney estate). Instead, Obama was photographed visiting a senior citizens’ home in the battleground state of Ohio.

And the hits kept coming. Next, Vanity Fair published an article listing the Romneys’ various offshore investment accounts worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in the secretive tax havens of Cayman Islands and Bermuda, as well as a since-closed Swiss bank account. Democrats stoked the predictable outrage from the revelations. On the Sunday ABC news program “This Week”, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley thundered:

“Mitt Romney bets against America. He bet against America when he put his money in Swiss bank accounts and tax havens and shelters.”

On the same program, Bobbie Jindal, Republican governor of Louisiana, could only lamely respond:

“In terms of Governor Romney’s financial success, I’m happy that he’s a successful businessman.”

While there is no evidence that the Romneys illegally evaded taxes through their various offshore accounts (their secretiveness making it impossible to tell), the reek of entitlement became overwhelming when it was revealed that the Romneys had accumulated somewhere between $20m and $101m in an “IRA”, a tax-advantaged retirement account designed for middle-class savers, limited to a few thousand dollars a year contribution. As one commenter parried, “I may be stupid, but I ain’t no fool.” In other words, we might be too stupid to understand how Romney was able to obtain all these tax breaks legally, but we aren’t fooled about unfairness of it all.

Well, at this point, you might think that the next sighting of Romney would be of him clothed in ash-cloth ladling out soup at an inner-city soup kitchen. But no. Next, we were regaled with the New York Times story of a lavish fundraiser in the Hamptons hosted by the infamous David Koch, the billionaire benefactor of conservative causes. The optics were worse than bad, as the Times recounted how one woman in a Range Rover, idling in a 30-deep line of cars waiting for entry, yelled to a Romney aide, “Is there a VIP entrance? We are VIP.”

Romney was expected to haul in several million dollars from his trip to wine and dine with the billionaires of the Hamptons. But why risk confirming the very message that Democrats have been hammering upon: that Romney is a super-wealthy elitist whose objective is to further the interests of the 0.01%?

Certainly, billionaires for Romney would have given him those millions without the face-time and the photo-ops, the chance to dress up and be seen. And to be heckled by Occupy Wall Street protesters and parodied by reporters. What is so very puzzling about the whole episode is the sheer in-your-face-ness of it.

Yet, perhaps that is the point. As a very perceptive article in the New York Magazine, Lisa Miller describes how new psychological research indicates that wealth erodes empathy with others. In the “Money-Empathy Gap”, Miller cites one researcher who says that:

“The rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”

Researchers found a consistent correlation between higher income, management responsibility and disagreeableness. One researcher interpreted her findings to imply that money makes people disinterested in the welfare of others. “It’s not a bad analogy to think of them as a little autistic” says Kathleen Vos, a professor at the University of Minnesota.

If this research is accurate (as it seems to be, replicated in various ways by several researches), the synergies between it, the increasing concentration of wealth and the Citizens United ruling, have striking implications for the future of the Republican party. As Newt Gingrich, the uber-southern politician, plaintively explained how he lost the Republican primary: “Romney had 16 billionaires. I had only one.” The domination by the super-wealthy means that Republicans not only have no interest in the welfare of the rest of the 99.9%, they have no understanding of why this is a problem. The noblesse oblige days of the old money, such as the Bushes, the Kennedys and the Roosevelts are long gone, replaced by the new mega-money of hedge funds, corporate raiders and global industrialists.

How else can one explain the allegiance of the Republican party to the profoundly unpopular Ryan tax plan, which would eviscerate Medicare and Medicaid while delivering more tax cuts to the rich? What is the future of a party in a democracy when the powers-that-be can no longer even understand, much less address, the welfare of the vast majority of its citizens?

Taking the hint, the Obama administration is finally positioning itself firmly on the side of progressives, attacking income inequality and holding Republicans accountable for their assaults on the middle and working classes. How ironic it would be if, after all, the other side’s big money is the answer to the Democrats’ prayers.

 

By: Robin Wells, The Guardian, July 12, 2012

July 15, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Republican Party Is Becoming Goofy”: Judge Richard Posner Bashes Supreme Court’s Citizens United Ruling

The American political system is marked by legal corruption in which “wealthy people essential bribe legislators” with campaign contributions, according to one of the nation’s most influential federal judges.

Speaking to foreign educators, Judge Richard Posner told the assembled that the wealthy give lots of money to legislators and that an individual legislator “knows that if he doesn’t promote the interests of the donor,” he won’t get any more money.

Posner is a renowned member of the Chicago-based Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. He is not only the nation’s most prolific jurist-academic, he is seen by some as the most influential judge outside of the nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Posner is intellectually fearless and, increasingly, far from the reflexively conservative thinker that he’s been long seen to be. In a recent National Public Radio interview, he spoke of the “real deterioration in conservative thinking” in recent years. “I’ve become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy.”

Posner has taken a poke at the high court’s controversial ruling before. But he’s taking his disdain for the decision to a broader audience. His latest comments came at a post-luncheon appearance Thursday before visiting Asian legal academics at the University of Chicago Law School, where he remains a faculty member.

Posner left no doubt about his criticism of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United campaign-finance decision. He said, “Our political system is pervasively corrupt due to our Supreme Court taking away campaign-contribution restrictions on the basis of the First Amendment.”

He also didn’t mind naming some names, in particular that of Justice Antonin Scalia, a onetime member of the law school faculty who lectured and taught at the school in February. Posner brought up the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, affirming the right of individuals to have handguns at home for self-defense.

Posner doesn’t think the Second Amendment has anything to do with an individual’s right to bear arms, a basis of the decision for which Scalia wrote the majority opinion.

“That didn’t slow down Scalia,” Posner told his Asian listeners. “He loves guns. He’s a hunter.”

 

By: James Warren, The Daily Beast, July 14, 2012

July 15, 2012 Posted by | GOP | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“That’s All That’s Necessary”: Mitt Romney, “I’m Not Releasing Any More Tax Returns”

The most newsy item of Mitt Romney’s media blitz of network interview after network interview Friday night was his bold statement that he would not release any more tax returns than the two years he has already planned, despite growing pressure from President Barack Obama, Democrats and even some Republicans.

He said basically the same thing in every interview, but we’ll pick out two — from CBS with Jan Crawford and CNN with Jim Acosta. Here’s what he told CBS’ Crawford:

CRAWFORD: Governor you mentioned the tax returns. You’ve released one year of your tax returns. A lot of people are saying you should release more, you’ve got to go back to the early 1980s for a Republican — or a presidential candidate who has only released one year of tax returns. Are you going to be releasing more tax returns?

GOV. ROMNEY: Yes, I’ll be releasing this year’s tax returns as soon as they’re available. And uh – But I know, by the way, you can never satisfy the opposition research team of the Obama organization. They’ll always want more. And the answer is they’ll have this year’s and last year’s and that’s the information that, by the way, is not required by law. It’s the same type of information that was provided by Senator McCain and his campaign. It gives people a full review of my income and my expenses and that kind of matter. I’ll tell ya, it’s quite a process running for president. You obviously provide all the information you can about yourself and then you have all the opposition team say some pretty outrageous things which I think are very, very disappointing on their part.

And here’s what he told CNN’s Acosta:

First of all, we’ve complied with the law. The law requires us to put out a full financial disclosure. That I’ve done. And then, in addition to that, I’ve already put out one year of tax returns. We’ll put out the next year of tax returns as soon as the accountants have that ready. And that’s what we’re going to put out.

I know there will always be calls for more. People always want to get more. And, you know, we’re putting out what is required plus more that is not required. And those are the two years that people are going to have. And that’s all that’s necessary for people to understand something about my finances. And, look, if people believe this should be a campaign about attacking one another on a personal basis and go back to the kinds of attacks that were suggested in some campaigns in the past, I don’t want to go there.

 

By: Brett LoGiurato, Business Insider, July 13, 2012

July 15, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

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