[Peace-discuss] the politics of greed

[C. G. Estabrook]

---- Original message ----
>Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:12:56 -0500
>From: <ppatton at uiuc.edu>  
>Subject: [Peace-discuss] the politics of greed  
>To: Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
>
>Losing Our Country
>by Paul Krugman
> 
>Baby boomers like me grew up in a relatively equal society. In
>the 1960's America was a place in which very few people were
>extremely wealthy, many blue-collar workers earned wages that
>placed them comfortably in the middle class, and working
>families could expect steadily rising living standards and a
>reasonable degree of economic security.
>
>But as The Times's series on class in America reminds us, that
>was another country. The middle-class society I grew up in no
>longer exists.
>
>Working families have seen little if any progress over the
>past 30 years. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the
>median family doubled between 1947 and 1973. But it rose only
>22 percent from 1973 to 2003, and much of that gain was the
>result of wives' entering the paid labor force or working
>longer hours, not rising wages.
>
>Meanwhile, economic security is a thing of the past:
>year-to-year fluctuations in the incomes of working families
>are far larger than they were a generation ago. All it takes
>is a bit of bad luck in employment or health to plunge a
>family that seems solidly middle-class into poverty.
>
>But the wealthy have done very well indeed. Since 1973 the
>average income of the top 1 percent of Americans has doubled,
>and the income of the top 0.1 percent has tripled.
>
>Why is this happening? I'll have more to say on that another
>day, but for now let me just point out that middle-class
>America didn't emerge by accident. It was created by what has
>been called the Great Compression of incomes that took place
>during World War II, and sustained for a generation by social
>norms that favored equality, strong labor unions and
>progressive taxation. Since the 1970's, all of those
>sustaining forces have lost their power.
>
>Since 1980 in particular, U.S. government policies have
>consistently favored the wealthy at the expense of working
>families - and under the current administration, that
>favoritism has become extreme and relentless. From tax cuts
>that favor the rich to bankruptcy "reform" that punishes the
>unlucky, almost every domestic policy seems intended to
>accelerate our march back to the robber baron era.
>
>It's not a pretty picture - which is why right-wing partisans
>try so hard to discredit anyone who tries to explain to the
>public what's going on.
>
>These partisans rely in part on obfuscation: shaping, slicing
>and selectively presenting data in an attempt to mislead. For
>example, it's a plain fact that the Bush tax cuts heavily
>favor the rich, especially those who derive most of their
>income from inherited wealth. Yet this year's Economic Report
>of the President, in a bravura demonstration of how to lie
>with statistics, claimed that the cuts "increased the overall
>progressivity of the federal tax system."
>
>The partisans also rely in part on scare tactics, insisting
>that any attempt to limit inequality would undermine economic
>incentives and reduce all of us to shared misery. That claim
>ignores the fact of U.S. economic success after World War II.
>It also ignores the lesson we should have learned from recent
>corporate scandals: sometimes the prospect of great wealth for
>those who succeed provides an incentive not for high
>performance, but for fraud.
>
>Above all, the partisans engage in name-calling. To suggest
>that sustaining programs like Social Security, which protects
>working Americans from economic risk, should have priority
>over tax cuts for the rich is to practice "class warfare." To
>show concern over the growing inequality is to engage in the
>"politics of envy."
>
>But the real reasons to worry about the explosion of
>inequality since the 1970's have nothing to do with envy. The
>fact is that working families aren't sharing in the economy's
>growth, and face growing economic insecurity. And there's good
>reason to believe that a society in which most people can
>reasonably be considered middle class is a better society -
>and more likely to be a functioning democracy - than one in
>which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty.
>
>Reversing the rise in inequality and economic insecurity won't
>be easy: the middle-class society we have lost emerged only
>after the country was shaken by depression and war. But we can
>make a start by calling attention to the politicians who
>systematically make things worse in catering to their
>contributors. Never mind that straw man, the politics of envy.
>Let's try to do something about the politics of greed. 
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