“Income Inequality Creates Huge Gaps In Opportunity”: The Class Divide Is One Of The Biggest Problems Now Facing The Country
By now, you’ve surely heard of the Texas drunken-driving case that has sparked national outrage — angering victims, upsetting psychologists and sending Twitter into overdrive. A 16-year-old who killed four people while intoxicated was sentenced to 10 years’ probation and treatment in a tony rehab facility.
As unusual as that example of mercy may be, it was the rationale offered by a defense expert that drove observers into a frenzy. A psychologist hired by defense attorneys told the court that the young man’s tragically irresponsible actions were the fault of his rich parents, who didn’t rear him with sufficient discipline. As a consequence, G. Dick Miller said, the teenager suffered from “affluenza” and didn’t know right from wrong. (Many other psychologists have disagreed vociferously, saying there is no such diagnosis.)
It’s hard to stomach that notion, especially since Judge Jean Boyd of the Fort Worth Juvenile Court seems to have swallowed it whole. I can’t imagine how bitter and resentful — not to mention mystified — the victims’ families must be.
But Boyd might have unintentionally done us a favor by opening the door to a dank, dark room that we have worked too hard to keep closed. She has let out the putrid aromas of economic inequality, which we have long ignored. Wealthy people, the judge’s sentence reminds us, have huge advantages over ordinary folk, despite an American mythology about equal opportunity. And the opportunity gap is growing as inequality cleaves the country into haves and have-nots.
The very terms “wage gap” and “disappearing middle class” have become clichés in Washington, often muttered by pandering politicians and comfortable journalists who have little real understanding of the effect that income inequality has had on the lives of ordinary Americans. But the fallout is real enough.
Since the 1970s, the wages of working-class Americans — those without college degrees — have stagnated and fallen further and further behind. Meanwhile, the wealthy have only become more prosperous.
Despite what you may believe to be true, the individual’s work ethic has little to do with those results. No matter how hardworking you are, a job at Walmart won’t give you much in the way of financial security. And if you are born to parents who can give you a trust fund, it doesn’t matter how little you work; you’ll still have plenty of security.
The trends that have eaten away at the great American middle — including globalization and technological gains — have been evident for decades, but the Great Recession accelerated the consequences. Even as economic data show huge gains in productivity, the jobless rate remains high, stuck at around 7 percent. (Translation: Companies have found ways to get more and more work done with technology, whether it’s through eliminating bank tellers and installing more ATMs, or using more robots in factories.)
This is a complex problem with no easy answers, but we could make a start toward solutions by looking squarely at the issue and refusing to call it by other names. Here are a few things it’s not: indolence, racism, the failure of the welfare state.
Mitt Romney became appropriately infamous for his condescending dismissal of the “47 percent” who he claimed don’t want to work, but that wrong-headed idea doesn’t stop with Romney. U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA), running for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate, has proposed that poor children sweep school cafeteria floors in exchange for free or reduced lunches, a deal that would get the “myth out of their head that there is such a thing as a free lunch,” he said.
But liberals often get it wrong, too — confusing rampant income inequality with racism. The legacy of racism has certainly contributed to the wealth gap between black and white Americans, but class is now a bigger factor in a child’s future than race. President Obama’s children are virtually assured a bright future, while millions of their cohort among the working classes are not.
The class divide is one of the biggest problems now facing the country, and it’s time we started to confront it. Judge Boyd’s unjust sentence is just the provocation to force us to take it on.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, December 28, 2013
“During The Holidays, Remember Our Least”: Today We Have To Say “Thou Shalt Not” To An Economy Of Exclusion And Inequality
As we celebrate the holiday season, we are instructed by virtually all faiths to turn our thoughts to the “least of these.” January will mark the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, but most notable today is how impoverished our discussion of poverty is.
Political leaders in both parties pledge to save the “middle class,” because polls show that most Americans consider themselves part of the broad middle. Democrats tout their “middle out” economics against Republican “trickle-down” economics. Republicans claim to be fighting to save small businesses and middle-class homeowners from the rapacious demands of government. Very little attention is given to the poorest among us.
Perhaps that is because poverty scars this rich nation. A recent report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) reveals that among 35 developed nations the United States ranks 34th in childhood poverty, above only Romania, a country several times less wealthy. Worse, we are also next to last in the depth of childhood poverty — the gap between average income of child’s family and that of poverty standard.
There is no argument about the facts. The poor were much more deprived when Lyndon Johnson declared his “war on poverty,” of course, but the percentage in poverty hasn’t changed much . Childhood poverty translates into poor health, poor education, and poor prospects. It isn’t an accident that the country frequently at the top of the international education rankings – Finland — also has the lowest levels of childhood poverty in that U.N. study.
So you’d think Washington would be focused on what to do to reduce the number of children in poverty, to address mass unemployment, declining wages, family distress. Instead, Washington has decided to administer a little “tough love.” Last month, Congress cut food stamps by an average of 7 percent for 48 million Americans . And this week 1.3 million jobless Americans will lose unemployment benefits , with as many as 5 million left in the cold over the course of the coming year .
In his recent “exhortation,” Pope Francis wrote starkly about the moral challenge of poverty:
“We can only praise the steps being taken to improve people’s welfare in areas such as health care, education and communications. At the same time, we have to remember that the majority of our contemporaries are barely living from day to day, with dire consequences. A number of diseases are spreading. The hearts of many people are gripped by fear and desperation, even in the so-called rich countries. . . .[Emphasis added.]
“Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”
Here, the Pope was standing firmly in the long tradition of the church’s concern for the poor, but among American conservatives, the response was hysteria. Rush Limbaugh accused him of peddling “pure Marxism.” Louis Woodhill in Forbes scorned him for “Papal Bull” that seemed “copied and pasted out of The Nation or Mother Jones.” (I take that as a compliment.) Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), a pious Catholic, was notably silent.
In a recent speech on inequality, President Obama insisted, “We are a better country than this,” and he made the case for government action. But his agenda was far less impressive than his rhetoric — including lower corporate tax rates, more trade accords, “streamlined” regulations, a “responsible budget” (meaning continued austerity).
The president touted his “race to the top” education program, when, in fact, schools in low-income districts have been forced to fire teachers, leaving classrooms far more crowded. He bragged on his college loan efforts even as reports showed students are graduating even deeper in debt. He did repeat his call for universal preschool and raising the minimum wage, but neither of these has been able even to receive a vote in the Republican-led House.
The reality is that government programs to lift the poor work. Johnson’s War on Poverty brought poverty down dramatically, but that war was lost to the war in Vietnam. Today, the United States does a much better job lifting poor children out of poverty than it did before Johnson pushed through Medicare and Medicaid expansions, child nutrition programs, subsidized school lunches and more. Even so, the United States still does far less than other developed countries. In 2010, for example, Dutch government programs reduced its poverty rate from 25 percent to 7.5 percent , while the United States only reduced its rate from 28 percent to 17 percent .
Two fundamental issues should be at the center of our debate. The first, posed by Pope Francis and Barack Obama, is what must be done to make the economy work for working people? The second is that posed by the president: Are we a better country than this? Do we want to be? We know what works. We can afford it, even more than other industrial countries. But are we prepared to do what needs to be done?
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 24, 2013
“The Meaning Of A Decent Society”: What Do We Owe One Another As Members Of The Same Society?
It’s the season to show concern for the less fortunate among us. We should also be concerned about the widening gap between the most fortunate and everyone else.
Although it’s still possible to win the lottery (your chance of winning $648 million in the recent Mega Millions sweepstakes was one in 259 million), the biggest lottery of all is what family we’re born into. Our life chances are now determined to an unprecedented degree by the wealth of our parents.
That’s not always been the case. The faith that anyone could move from rags to riches – with enough guts and gumption, hard work and nose to the grindstone – was once at the core of the American Dream.
And equal opportunity was the heart of the American creed. Although imperfectly achieved, that ideal eventually propelled us to overcome legalized segregation by race, and to guarantee civil rights. It fueled efforts to improve all our schools and widen access to higher education. It pushed the nation to help the unemployed, raise the minimum wage, and provide pathways to good jobs. Much of this was financed by taxes on the most fortunate.
But for more than three decades we’ve been going backwards. It’s far more difficult today for a child from a poor family to become a middle-class or wealthy adult. Or even for a middle-class child to become wealthy.
The major reason is widening inequality. The longer the ladder, the harder the climb. America is now more unequal that it’s been for eighty or more years, with the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of all developed nations. Equal opportunity has become a pipe dream.
Rather than respond with policies to reverse the trend and get us back on the road to equal opportunity and widely-shared prosperity, we’ve spent much of the last three decades doing the opposite.
Taxes have been cut on the rich, public schools have deteriorated, higher education has become unaffordable for many, safety nets have been shredded, and the minimum wage has been allowed to drop 30 percent below where it was in 1968, adjusted for inflation.
Congress has just passed a tiny bipartisan budget agreement, and the Federal Reserve has decided to wean the economy off artificially low interest rates. Both decisions reflect Washington’s (and Wall Street’s) assumption that the economy is almost back on track.
But it’s not at all back on the track it was on more than three decades ago.
It’s certainly not on track for the record 4 million Americans now unemployed for more than six months, or for the unprecedented 20 million American children in poverty (we now have the highest rate of child poverty of all developed nations other than Romania), or for the third of all working Americans whose jobs are now part-time or temporary, or for the majority of Americans whose real wages continue to drop.
How can the economy be back on track when 95 percent of the economic gains since the recovery began in 2009 have gone to the richest 1 percent?
The underlying issue is a moral one: What do we owe one another as members of the same society?
Conservatives answer that question by saying it’s a matter of personal choice – of charitable works, philanthropy, and individual acts of kindness joined in “a thousand points of light.”
But that leaves out what we could and should seek to accomplish together as a society. It neglects the organization of our economy, and its social consequences. It minimizes the potential role of democracy in determining the rules of the game, as well as the corruption of democracy by big money. It overlooks our strivings for social justice.
In short, it ducks the meaning of a decent society.
Last month Pope Francis wondered aloud whether “trickle-down theories, which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness…”. Rush Limbaugh accused the Pope of being a Marxist for merely raising the issue.
But the question of how to bring about greater justice and inclusiveness is as American as apple pie. It has animated our efforts for more than a century – during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society, and beyond — to make capitalism work for the betterment of all rather merely than the enrichment of a few.
The supply-side, trickle-down, market-fundamentalist views that took root in America in the early 1980s got us fundamentally off track.
To get back to the kind of shared prosperity and upward mobility we once considered normal will require another era of fundamental reform, of both our economy and our democracy.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, December 19, 2013
“Enough Already”: The New York Times And The ACA, The Yuppie Whine-Athon Continues
I see the New York Times has published yet another article about very privileged people whining about the ACA.
In this case, said article features a couple making $100,000 a year who, under the ACA, will be paying $1,000 a month for health care. Take it away, Dean Baker:
Here they are with a front page story telling us about the tragic situation of the Chapmans, a New Hampshire couple making $100,000 a year who will have to spend $1,000 a month for insurance with Obamacare. This would come to 12 percent of their income. The piece tells readers:
“Experts consider health insurance unaffordable once it exceeds 10 percent of annual income.”
That’s interesting. If we go to the Kaiser Family Foundation website we find that the average employee contribution for an employer provided family plan is $4,240. The average employer contribution is $11,240. That gives us a total of $15,470. Most economists would say that we should treat the employers payment as a cost to the worker since in general employers are no more happy to pay money to health insurance companies than to their workers. If they didn’t pay this money as health insurance then they would be paying it to their workers in wages.
A couple of years ago, when my ex-husband and I were paying for health insurance under COBRA, we were shelling out something like $1,200 a month for just the two of us — and we were making far less than 100K a year. In fact, we were earning more like half that.
Enough already. In the real world we live in, $1,000 a month for good health insurance for two people in the top quintile of U.S. household income is pretty damn good. Upper middle class people, quitcher whining already — and New York Times, please stop enabling this nonsense.
By: Kathleen Geier, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 21, 2013
“A Regular Joe He’s Not”: Among The Common Folk, A Breakfasting John Boehner
From the “Politicians—they’re just like us!” file today, we have something seemingly aimed straight at one of my pet peeves, the habit of Blue Collar Chic among politicians (and to an even greater extent, certain bigshot media figures). Esquire magazine asked John Boehner to “endorse” something, and what he came up with was “breakfast at a diner,” which he says he has “most mornings when I’m in Washington.” You may have thought the Speaker was a merlot-sipping, golf-playing gent who had risen above his hardscrabble roots. Au contraire!
I sit at the counter in jeans and a ballcap. Order eggs, and sometimes sausage, but never on Fridays. (And never the bacon. My diner makes lousy bacon. I don’t know why.) I’m there maybe 15, 20 minutes.
It’s pretty much the same thing on the road. I’m always looking for new diners, and when I find one I like, I stick with it.
It’s an anchor to my day, a way to feel like I’m home in Ohio no matter where I am. That’s why I endorse breakfast at a diner.
Mr. Speaker, if you’re eating eggs and sausage at a greasy spoon every morning, legislation isn’t the only thing getting clogged. But how wonderful to know that just like ordinary folks, you wear “jeans and a ballcap”! Since you presumably go to work after this breakfast, do you get dressed in your jeans and ballcap, then go back home and change into the suit you’ll wear the rest of the day on Capitol Hill? Why not just put on the suit, get the breakfast, and then proceed to work? Is the costume change really necessary?
I realize I’m making too much of this. And of course, when a magazine asks you to do something like this, you’ll be conscious of the image you’re projecting. Unlike a political “endorsement,” this endorsement is not about explaining to readers the wonders of breakfast at a diner, but telling them who you are, and if Boehner had endorsed an earthy yet whimsical Chateau Latour, he would have been mocked for an entirely different reason. But I find the efforts of politicians to convince us they’re just ordinary joes so insufferable, especially when it’s this transparent.
It’s only partly their fault, though. Every election season we’re treated to an endless discussion about which candidate is more reg’lar and can do a better job relating to the common folk, without any explanation of what that has to do with their potential performance in office. Here’s a little piece of the column I linked to above, when the question consuming some in the media, none more than Chris Matthews, was whether Barack Obama was too much of an effete swell to win the Pennsylvania primary over the (allegedly) slightly more down-to-earth Hillary Clinton. We knew he wasn’t, because he committed the horrible sin of being a crappy bowler:
Every night at 5 and 7, Matthews acts like a psychic channeling the spirit of the working class. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, he insightfully informs his viewers, are just not the type to whom Joe Sixpack takes a liking: “Pennsylvania prefers a beefier sort to either of these people, Matthews claimed, “a more rustic, tougher sort than either of them.” When neither Obama nor Clinton turned out to be particularly skilled bowlers, Matthews said gravely, “Maybe that tells you something about the Democratic party.”
In the days since, he has returned to the alleged symbolic importance of Obama’s lack of bowling skills so often, and with such a combination of glee and indignation, that you would have thought that before launching a gutter ball, Obama had donned a powdered wig, sipped from a snifter of brandy, then smacked Rocky Blier across the face with his riding crop. “This gets very ethnic,” Matthews said at one point, a preface that no doubt made his producers whisper, “Oh God, please don’t.” He then went on, “But the fact that he’s good at basketball doesn’t surprise anybody, but the fact that he’s that terrible at bowling does make you wonder.” Makes you wonder what, exactly? Whether he would be a better president, were he a better bowler? No, what Matthews wonders is whether Obama can “woo more regular voters — you know, the ones who actually do know how to bowl.”
According to the Times Magazine article, Matthews makes a salary of $5 million a year. When it comes time to relax, he doesn’t head to the Jersey shore, where the typical blue-collar Philadelphian might go to get some sea air. Instead, Matthews repairs to his $4.35 million house on Nantucket.
I don’t mind that Chris Matthews has a house on Nantucket; maybe I would too, if I made as much money as him. And I don’t care whether John Boehner prefers a fine wine to a downmarket beer. My problems with Boehner have nothing to do with his personal tastes in food and recreation. The thing about politicians is that they take positions and perform official actions that give great insight into whether and how much they care about regular people. That’s the place to look if you want to know who they really are. You don’t have to ask where they eat breakfast.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 17, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 