[Peace-discuss] ...take money from rich people and give it to poor people...

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Ron Szoke discussed this article on this week's News from Neptune (C- 
U cable channel 6, repeated thru the week); the following is from Doug  
Henwood of the excellent Left Business Observer.  --CGE]

How to stop worrying about class
Today’s [Feb. 10] New York Times contains a fine example of how  
ideology works at the high end: report information that might trouble  
the established order, but conclude on a tranquilizing note that  
allows the comfortable reader to turn the page (or click “close tab”)  
without changing his or her worldview. Both functions are important.  
Outlets like the Times do report tons of important stuff that one  
would be hard-pressed to learn otherwise. But, as Alexander Cockburn  
put it long ago, a primary function of the bourgeois press is  
reassurance.

The piece by Sabrina Tavernise, “Education Gap Grows Between Rich and  
Poor, Studies Show,” shows that “while the achievement gap between  
white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few  
decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown  
substantially during the same period.” (The paper from which much of  
the data is drawn, by Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, can be gotten  
here.) While it’s long been well known that parental income and  
education have a stronger influence on educational outcomes than  
schools themselves, the gap between kids from affluent and poor  
families is widening.

All that information, and then some, is nicely presented in the first  
half of the article. But the second half consists mostly of quotes  
from three right-wing sources: University of Chicago labor economist  
James Heckman; Bell Curve ghoul Charles Murray (newly famous for his  
cultural take on the crisis of the white working class); and Douglas  
Besharov, now of the Atlantic Institute but formerly of the American  
Enterprise Institute, where he ran the Social and Individual  
Responsibility Project. Heckman says the last thing we should do is  
give poor people more money. Murray says it has “nothing to do with  
money and everything to do with culture.” And Besharov chimes in with  
the inevitable “no easy answers,” because “no one has the slightest  
idea what will work.”

Nonsense. The answers are conceptually easy, though politically  
anything but. You take money from rich people and give it to poor  
people, and spend at least as much, maybe more, educating the children  
of the poor as you do on the children of the rich. But that might make  
the Times’ audience uncomfortable. Better to flatter them on their  
excellent parenting.

http://lbo-news.com/2012/02/10/how-to-stop-worrying-about-class/
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