. . . Now that we're second only to Romania for child poverty.
December 19, 2013
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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 $636 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.
Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most
recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He also
served on President Obama's transition advisory board. His latest book
is Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future. His homepage is
www.robertreich.org.
http://www.alternet.org/economy/robert-reich-what-will-it-take-us-get-back-being-decent-society
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