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#11. Up
from the Projects: profile of a woman and her son who rose from
welfare rolls to the middle class http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/class/index.html?hp Bibliography of books
consulted for this year-long journalistic project http://www.nytimes.com/ref/learning/newssummaries/classbibliography_LN.html Multimedia and Graphics from the series
http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?srcht=s&srchst=m&vendor=&query=%22class+matters%22 Teacher Resources http://www.nytimes.com/learning/issues_in_depth/20050515.html NYT Learning Network (grades 3-12) http://www.nytimes.com/learning/index.html Losing Our Country
By Paul Krugman, NYT, June 10, 2005 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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