[Peace-discuss] ...take money from rich people and give it to poor people...
C. G. Estabrook
cge at shout.net
Sat Feb 11 10:06:06 CST 2012
[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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