I heard part of the interview of the author of the new book
Polarized America this past week. Unfortunately, I can't remember where. Still, it presents a fascinating point of view.
The idea of America as politically polarized--that there is an unbridgeable divide between right and left, red and blue states--has become a cliché. What commentators miss, however, is that increasing polarization in recent decades has been closely accompanied by fundamental social and economic changes--most notably, a parallel rise in income inequality. In Polarized America, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal examine the relationships of polarization, wealth disparity, immigration, and other forces, characterizing it as a dance of give and take and back and forth causality.
In other words, in times in US history when there have been large gaps in income, there have been bitter examples of partisanship.
Here is a link to what might be the working paper that the author presented.
It is true that america is REALLY polarized. You either support something or you are completely against it. You can't just be tolerant of something, you have to be accepting or denouncing.
Economic inequality in the 2000s is much, much different from economic inequality in previous generations. The social factors at work now are completely different from those at work 100 years ago.
Economic inequality in the 2000s is much, much different from economic inequality in previous generations. The social factors at work now are completely different from those at work 100 years ago.
But the result is the same. The question is whether the political schism is a natural result or due to manipulation.
Why would middle class and working class Americans vote for a party which seems to be working against their interests? When was the last time Fox News dealt with a story on the fall of the middle class and the income gap?
The push towards social conservatism has been funded by those who want to move the debate from shared economic prosperity to Gay Marriage, Flag Burning, anything to distract the public from it's loss of broad based wealth.
The result is TOTALLY different today.
As little as five generations ago, unemployment was 25%, half of the population was at or near poverty level, taxes took 10-20% of ordinary income and the inequality meant that people literally starved.
Today starvation is unheard of, unemployment is 4.8%, about fifth of the people are at or near poverty level, taxes take 40-45% of ordinary income and the inequality means that the poor can only afford basic cable.
Yesterday an increase in gas price put people in the poor house. Today they get mad and skip their morning latte. Wise up, it is a new world and shit has changed. The social programs you are whining about are in place and have been in place for many decades. If there is still inequality it is not politically solvable. In fact the Democrats are working to reform and remove the programs.
The reason the Ds are not in power is because things have changed and economic issues are irrelevant to most people. Gay marriage is an issue now because so many other issues have been solved. The politics you are pursuing are a long-term loser.
The New Deal is over. And by the way, the USSR was an economic failure. The Chinese are Capitalists. Get used to the new situation or continue to lose.
Every time I hear John Lennon's Imagine, I have to laugh. Imagine is about all you could ever do with this world. Power and wealth is in the hands of the most aggressive (or their heirs). When you combine wealth, technology, and intellectual capital with aggressiveness, you pretty much control the world. Altruism is for losers. Those who don't have the wealth and intellectual capital tend toward fanaticism or are satisfied with the bread and circuses our tacky American culture provides. And it's like a disease. Last time I was in Brasil, for example, I stopped to look at the scene before me: to my left was a McDonalds, to my right was a Pizza Hut, across the street was a Blockbuster, and down the street in the distance was a WalMart. We're doomed by our greed.
If Brazil didn't want a WalMart, they wouldn't have one. They wouldn't have a WalMart if WalMart didn't think it would be profitable for them to open a store in a foreign country.
That's the special kind of doom that means progress.
Brasil is a country, and as such it is only an idea with abstract boundaries shown on a map, as is any country. People have "wants," not countries. Sao Paulo alone has about 30 million people, and many of them desire cheap and plentiful products, enough for WalMart to open stores there. Many others deeply resent the Americanization of "their" Brasil, and boycott Coke, McDonalds, and WalMart. They put anti-McDonalds bumper stickers on their fuscas (VW Bugs) and drink ONLY Guarana.
But some Brasilians display a very paradoxical love/hate pattern of behavior when it comes to American culture, deriding McDonalds while listening to the latest American songs on their car radios. Most universally loathe W., but want to supersize their universally small cars up to an American SUV. That's why I used the "disease" analogy. American style consumerism is taking over the world despite its critics. "Doom" indeed.
The Japanese do US-style consumerism much better than the Americans, and the Americans are buying Japanese products now. I say we call it Japanese-style consumerism from now on.
And another thing. Let's be honest. It's really anti-Americanism, isn't it? The VW drivers don't mind that a German company comes in, has them build the cars there, and converts everything to Euros at the end of the day. But they do mind if the Chinese make goods for dead cheap and ship directly to Brazil and sell it under a US brand and convert to dollars at the end of the day.
They don't mind if the soda is corporately made and corporately marketed, they just want the brand name to be the nationalistic style they want.
So help me, I can't tell the difference between this attitude and plain old vanilla xenophobia.
It involves brown people and therefore it's America's Fault. And racist.
Today starvation is unheard of
O RLY?
unemployment is 4.8%
Sure that doesn't have something to do with how
the measurement of unemployment has changed over the years? (Among other things, if you remain unemployed for an extended period, you're no longer counted. As of just several years ago, flipping burgers at McDonald's was changed to 'manufacturing'. Etc.)
Yesterday an increase in gas price put people in the poor house. Today they get mad and skip their morning latte.
Good to see you're concerned mostly with the people who had the money to blow on daily lattes to begin with.
People who are living paycheck to paycheck see rising fuel prices a bit differently. Really, are you limiting your examples of "how shit has changed" to what you know of the world by watching the middle class from the window of a Starbuck's?
Gay marriage is an issue now because so many other issues have been solved.
Oh, right, right. I guess I was mistaken. Here, I thought it was just a rediculous, emotional hot button that only comes up in election years and appeals to a culture that is constantly looking for the next boogeyman to blame all these "solved issues" on.
It is naive to think that being rich changes people, that wealth is the issue.
There are plenty of wealthy people who are much more of a solution than a problem... I think more than the opposite.
Those that are the problem, cause the majority of the problems... but there is not conspiracy and those who think so are just spinning their wheels.
The real polarization are those who can think for themselves and do what they think is right regardless of popular opinion and those who tout a party line, be it left or right.
Fine, amended, Kit: in the US there is hunger, but not one single sign of
starvation. Not one.
In NPR's worst efforts they found poor people who "made tough choices" but not one starvation amongst the lot of them.
They found 38 million people who are "food insecure" because as you said, they live paycheck to paycheck and one paycheck may not get the food on the table. And here's a picture of one of them, from "A Rural Struggle to Keep the Family Fed":
Or from "Hunger Hidden but Real in America's Suburbs":
I've seen pictures of real hunger and it sure doesn't look like this.
Something ironic is that the poor in the US eat fat almost exclusively and the rich starve themselves. It freaks me out.
Sure that doesn't have something to do with how the measurement of unemployment has changed over the years? (Among other things, if you remain unemployed for an extended period, you're no longer counted. As of just several years ago, flipping burgers at McDonald's was changed to 'manufacturing'. Etc.)
I took Econ 101, so yes, I'm sure. And by the way, I myself am one of those "no longer counted" people. Should I be counted? I could take a job delivering pizza tomorrow, if I cared to. I just don't care to. Should I be counted?
are you limiting your examples of "how shit has changed" to what you know of the world by watching the middle class from the window of a Starbucks?
No, I've been an active observer of the world.
It is an election year so we can expect both parties to play it fast and loose with the truth, while appealing to their bases baser instincts. Democrats played the minimum wage card this week.
Here are some other pesky facts that Dobbs failed to mention in his op-ed:
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2002 report, of the 72.7 million hourly-wage workers in the US, only 2.2 million, a mere 3%, received minimum wages. While that's bad for them, it's not a national crisis.
Only 5.3% of minimum-wage workers come from families below the poverty line.
The highest proportion of minimum wage workers were in the retail trade (8%), whereas agriculture only claimed 2%.
The vast majority of minimum wage workers either have second jobs or live with other family members and are not sole-source providers of income.
Minimum wages provide artificial barriers to those seeking their first job experience. Unemployment among 16–19-year-olds was 17.3% in 2005, as opposed to 5.6% overall. When split out by ethnicity, Hispanic and black teens had unemployment rates of 25% and 40% respectively. Analysts have been railing for decades about the social effects of youth unemployment, without even considering as a potential causative factor the ever-increasing minimum wage during all that time.After I read the below this week, I had to laugh, mostly because I knew his suggestion for a "maximum wage" would never fly. But I was a bit surprised by the vitriol in letters to the editor the next day. He was compared to Stalin and called a communist (this is the South, however). He's not arguing to get rid of capitalism. Give it a read and tell me if you agree with this guy:
[COLOR="Navy"]To share wealth, rework the system
By EDWARD L. RUBIN
Published on: 06/21/06
Edward L. Rubin is dean of the Vanderbilt University School of Law.
Income disparities are an increasingly serious problem in this country. At present, the top fifth of the population receives more than 50 percent of the nation's annual income, while the bottom fifth receives around 3.5 percent. In addition, the percent of total national income has declined over the past quarter-century for the bottom 80 percent — while the share of the top 20 percent has steadily increased. As a result, we are approaching the income disparity levels of a Third World country.
Those who comment on America's income disparity often speak in terms of social stress. If these disparities continue, they suggest, we are likely to suffer from widespread demoralization or increasing class conflict. This seems to be an unpromising strategy, not only because there is no empirical evidence that it's occurring, but also because of its implicit, if strongly suppressed, suggestion that the poor and middle class ought to become more rebellious — something that would probably do no one very much good.
The theme that should be sounded is that the present distribution of income is simply unfair. Most of the adults in those lower four-fifths, even the ones in the lowest, work for a living, and most work as hard as the people in the top fifth. Our system is tilted against them.
The reason for our income disparity is not that the people in the top fifth deserve so much more money, but that we have a regressive tax system, excessive tax loopholes for the wealthy, unmonitored corporate compensation and a defective public educational system that limits social mobility and the ability of people who can't afford private school to develop their talents. The image of the lazy, unmotivated poor is largely a myth, and certainly doesn't apply to four-fifths of our population.
So how can we deal with this in a progressive manner? To begin, raising the minimum wage is probably a good approach, but lowering the maximum wage may be an even better one.
Executive compensation has reached stratospheric levels in the United States, largely because of stock options and other incentive-related payments. This sounded like a wonderful idea at the time it was first conceived — pay the top executives better if the firm makes higher profits — but it has spiraled out of control. The problem is that the corporate board members who approve these payments are spending the firm's money, not their own; they don't benefit from the firm's profit levels or suffer if the firm squanders its resources on excessive executive salaries.
Unfortunately, the only way to limit executive compensation is through national regulation, and there does not seem to be much taste for solutions of this sort.
The other way to redistribute income is through the tax system. One would imagine that a redistributive tax system would garner widespread popular support. But it is a somewhat weird feature of the American mentality that so many people in this country think they have a chance of becoming wealthy, and often identify more closely with the interests of an increasingly remote elite than with their own interests. This is amplified by the continuing reverberations of frontier individualism, the belief that people deserve to keep "their" money, and should not have it taxed away for public purposes.
For both these problems — excessive corporate compensation and a regressive tax system — I think we need a new political discourse. People need to understand that everyone's money comes from the economic system to which we all contribute.
Corporate executives, and even individual entrepreneurs, can only earn the amounts they do because the system provides them with a framework that generates large rewards for those fortunate enough to be located at its crucial junctures.
While talent and training should be appropriately compensated, that compensation should not be so far out of proportion with the rest of society.
The economy grows through the efforts of all working Americans, and all should be able to improve our lives as a result of it, not just the top 20 percent of the population.[/COLOR]
I've seen pictures of real hunger and it sure doesn't look like this.
Yeah, I was tickled by those images, myself. I don't doubt that we are better off, today, but I do think there is a widening gap and on the bad end are usually single women/mothers trying to scrape enough money together to try to get a deposit in on a low-income apartment and out of the weekly stay places downtown. They work jobs at/slightly above minimum wage with no benefits, hardly a "living wage".
The gap, today, is an interesting one in that people aren't out deficient in the same ways they were decades ago. Standards of living are up in some aspects, but down in others. Cheap, fattening food might be easier to come by, but healthcare is largely absent from low wage workers.
I've pointed it out, before, but
this book was an interesting experiment in living in those conditions. It can be done, but getting out of that condition seems extremely difficult except for a lucky few. The conditions these people live in are certainly better than the poor of 1930, but their lives are hardly full of luxury coffee and air conditioned bliss. They're unhealthy and fairly miserable.
Dean Rubin has been a consultant to the Asia Foundation Project on the Administrative Licensing Law for the People's Republic of China, the Russian Privatization Center and to the United Nations Development Programme.
Rage must be right! Wait a minute, "Russian Privatization"??? Now I'm confused.