The next time a Republican politician or pundit earnestly invokes concern for the welfare and well-being of the "American people" as a reason for opposing President Obama's economic policies, please just laugh in his/her face. Then ask precisely which Americans he/she is referring to.
Much has been written about income inequality and the gap between the rich and poor in this country. The issue is in the air quite a bit now, as the health care reform debate comes to a climax and the nation grapples with how (or whether) to address climate change and the financial crisis, etc.
Loud and powerful conservative voices have been spreading alarm at the prospect that Obama's policies will "redistribute wealth" and lower our standard of living. Again, one has to ask: who exactly are the people these conservatives are so worried about? Is it the "ordinary Americans" Sarah Palin extolls so often in her speeches? I don't think so.
The reality is inescapable: over the last generation, public policy - largely led by the conservative movement - has overwhelmingly favored the wealthy over the middle-class and the poor.
It would be pointless to enumerate all the depressing statistics that support this truth, as they are well-documented elsewhere. It's instructive, however, to compare a couple of brief analyses.
Here is how the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, a publication of the conservative Hoover Institute sees it:
The 1990s and early 2000s witnessed the establishment of a growing body of work, increasingly precise, describing how the income distribution has changed. This work can be summarized in three points:
• The distribution of pretax income in the United States today is highly unequal. The most careful studies suggest that the top 10 percent of households, with average income of about $200,000, received 42 percent of all pretax money income in the late 1990s. The top 1 percent of households, averaging $800,000 of income, received 15 percent of all pretax money income.
• In the longer view, the path of income inequality over the twentieth century is marked by two main events: a sharp fall in inequality around the outbreak of World War II and an extended rise in inequality that began in the mid-1970s and accelerated in the 1980s. Income inequality today is about as large as it was in the 1920s.
• Over multiple years, family income fluctuates, and so the distribution of multiyear income is moderately more equal than the distribution of single-year income.
All recent economic data confirm that these inequalities grew more stark during the Bush era.
The same entry in the CEE quotes Hoover Institute economist David Henderson:
Inequality of wages and incomes is clearly bad if it results from government privileges. Many people would find such an outcome unjust, but even more important to many economists is that such inequality sets up perverse incentives. Instead of producing valuable products and services for their fellow citizens, as people tend to do in free economies, people in societies based on government-granted privileges devote much of their effort to pleasing, or outright bribing, government officials.
You might be surprised to learn that in this passage Mr. Henderson is referring to nations in Africa. It's surprising because it is such an accurate description of economic and political conditions in our own country. Has Mr. Henderson somehow failed to notice how inequality of wages and incomes has come about here in the good ole U.S of A.? It is precisely through the granting of "government privileges."
Is there a more concise rendering of the policies of the past thirty years and the current political maneuvering in Washington during the debates over health care, climate change and financial regulation than the phrase, "people in societies based on government-granted privileges devote much of their effort to pleasing, or outright bribing, government officials?"
But this could not possibly be so in our economy, right? Heaven forbid. So Mr. Henderson goes on to justify our economic conditions here in America:
But inequality in wages and incomes in relatively free economies serves two important social functions. First, it gives people strong incentives to produce so as to make higher incomes and wages. Second, it gives people, and not just young people, strong incentives to get training or education that will allow them to perform well in higher-wage jobs.
Really? As I survey the human wreckage created by thirty years of Republican economic policies - the financial crisis, the foreclosure crisis, bankruptcies from lack of health insurance, joblessness, a broken educational system, etc. - my overwhelming "incentive" is to drop every Republican politician (and all of their enablers) into the miserable ghettos of North Philadelphia for a week or so and see which ones come out alive. (What a great idea for a new Reality TV show!)
The editors at the Nation captured some of this outrage in last year's issue on wealth in America:
Over the past three decades, market-worshiping politicians and their corporate backers have engineered the most colossal redistribution of wealth in modern world history, a redistribution from the bottom up, from working people to a tiny global elite.
This three-decade war against common sense has preached that tax cuts for the rich help the poor, that labor unions keep workers from prospering, that regulations protecting consumers attack freedom. Duly inspired, our elected officials have rewritten the rules that run our economy--on taxes and trade, on wage policies and public spending--to benefit wealthy asset owners and global corporations.
You might think the public would finally recognize that the economic policies we have all lived through for the past thirty years have been predicated on dishonesty and fraud. You might think the public might finally notice that the Republican party is not on their side. You might think that they would see the Republican Party's phony populism and cries of "socialism" for what they really are: an attempt to perpetuate the economic inequality they helped to create at the expense of the very people they claim to be fighting for.
You would be wrong. The right's fear-mongering has been surprisingly successful at creating the perception that they - not Obama, not the Democrats - have the Ordinary Joe's economic interests at heart. Thirty years of failed policy notwithstanding, they continue to pull the wool over people's eyes and attract adherents, even as their economic ideology has been thoroughly discredited.
President Obama's economic record has been far from perfect. He has said all the right things, but he has left grave doubts in many minds about his commitment to the values of social justice and economic equality that he campaigned on.
But let there be no doubt: Obama's over-arching philosophy represents a return to progressive ideals and to economic policies that aim to restore basic fairness to our economically stratified society.
The shrillness of the attacks on President Obama, the increasingly hysterical and phony Populist outrage, the unceasing use of obstructionist tactics in the Congress are all a public manifestation of the conservative right's private, primal fear: that an extended era of successful progressive policies under Mr. Obama will expose the fraud they've perpetrated upon the American public and end the era of special government-granted privileges they've enjoyed for so long.
For more from this writer, please visit: http://bareleft.blogspot.com