Who Stole the American Dream?

Yesterday. Barack Obama won a second term as president. It was a victory for the liberal Democrats among us, myself included. Yet the House stayed Republican, and the Senate kept (or possibly slightly enlarged) its slim Democratic majority. The potential for gridlock is still there.


That's too bad. As Hedrick Smith's book Who Stole the American Dream? says, Americans are more economically unequal than at any time since the Roaring '20s some 90 years ago and, before that, the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.

Americans need more than jobs from the next four years. They need good jobs plus good opportunities for advancement.

As Obama's predecessor,  Mr. Smith notes, George W. Bush once averred that income inequality had been "rising for more than 25 years." Bush attributed the rising income gap to "an economy that increasingly rewards education and skills" — attributes that a significant swath of Americans lack enough of.

Others have attributed the wealth/income gap in America to increasing globalization of trade and industry, so that we buy more products made in China and elsewhere — and fewer products made in the U.S.A.

Another blame factor is the rise of high-tech industry. The old "rust belt" industries here in America have long faced reduced demand for their products, while Chinese-made iPhones and iPads fly out the door.

All the above causes of income/wealth inequality may be things that were bound to happen to us sometime, so that they can be seen as problems that are serious but don't necessarily have ready solutions.

But Hedrick Smith makes clear that the main culprits are not insufficient education/skills, not high-tech industries, not globalization. They are instead man-made changes that have transpired since the mid-1970s: Washington's rewriting of key U.S. tax and other laws along with a new selfishness in America's corporate culture.

These twin factors have led to the rise of a super-rich class who have prospered mightily, mainly because of their heightened ability to manipulate their corporations' stock prices while at the same time killing average Americans' jobs.

Smith writes:

Over the past three decades, we have become Two Americas. We are no longer one large American family with shared prosperity and shared political and economic power, as we were in the decades following World War II. ... 

The causes do not lie in the last election or the one before that. They predate the financial collapse of 2008. The timeline to our modern national quagmire lies embedded in the longer arc of our history ... from 1971 to the present ...

There is growing, and disturbing, evidence that America has evolved into a caste society, increasingly stratified in terms of wealth and income, with people at the bottom almost frozen there, generation after generation, and people at the top more and more frequently passing on the self-fulfilling advantages of high status to their children and grandchildren. Increasingly, privilege sustains privilege; poverty begets poverty.

I heard very little talk about boosting opportunity for advancement for middle-class Americans during the election campaign. True, Obama came out for such things as increased aid to community colleges, presented as a jobs-preparation initiative. And that's fine. It would help young people get aboard the gravy train to desirable employment.

But it would not by itself make the necessary changes to the tax code and the regulatory environment that would roll back the structural advantages that today accrue to the very wealthy, thereby putting a glass ceiling over the middle class.

"I Dream of Gini ..."

In this series of posts about rising economic inequality in America, I'm talking about how the American middle class has been hammered since the mid-1970s, while the well-off have seen their wealth and incomes skyrocket.

The map at left shows that distributing U.S. land according to how U.S. wealth is distributed would have the richest 10 percent of Americans hogging the whole continental United States north of a line stretching between Los Angeles and Raleigh, North Carolina. The remaining 90 percent of us would need to divvy up the land below that line. The poorest 40 percent among us would get squeezed into a tiny dot about the size of Corpus Christi, Texas.

That's one way to show the extent of the inequality, but economists prefer the Gini coefficient. According to "For richer, for poorer," a recent special report in The Economist:

The best-known way of measuring inequality is the Gini coefficient, named after an Italian statistician called Corrado Gini. It aggregates the gaps between people’s incomes into a single measure. If everyone in a [society] has the same income, the Gini coefficient is 0; if all income goes to one person, it is 1.

"America’s Gini for disposable income is up by almost 30% since 1980, [from 0.30] to 0.39," says The Economist. Is that bad, or not so bad?

Scandinavian countries have the smallest income disparities, with a Gini coefficient for disposable income of around 0.25. At the other end of the spectrum the world’s most unequal, such as South Africa, register Ginis of around 0.6. (Because of the way the scale is constructed, a modest-sounding difference in the Gini ratio implies a big difference in inequality.)

So 0.39 is pretty bad, but more worrying than that is the 30% rise since 1980. In this erstwhile land of opportunity, a sizable jump in Gini suggests that opportunity has been knocking on middle-class doors a lot less often that it once did.

By another formal measure of inequality, says The Economist, things look even worse:

Including capital gains, the share of national income going to the richest 1% of Americans has doubled since 1980, from 10% to 20%, roughly where it was a century ago. Even more striking, the share going to the top 0.01% — some 16,000 families with an average income of $24 [million] — has quadrupled, from just over 1% to almost 5%. That is a bigger slice of the national pie than the top 0.01% received 100 years ago.

Mark Twain

100 years ago, America was in the Progressive Era, a time in which the excesses of the Gilded Age — "an era of serious social problems hidden by a thin layer of gold," according to satirists Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today — were being forcibly pared back by activist government. It was during the Progressive Era that the U.S. Constitution was amended to allow the levying of an income tax, and that the corporate monopolies of the "robber barons" — at that time the monopolies were called "trusts" — were getting "busted."

If the top one percent grab fully 20% of the income our economy generates nowadays, isn't it fair to say that we live in a New Gilded Age today?

Who's Working Class? Me? You? Anybody?

The American political conversation these days seems to have deleted "working class" as a term representing a broad swath of the American people. We hear about "the wealthy." We hear about "the middle class." We hear reference made to "the poor." But what happened to "the working class"?

First of all, be it known that I personally am not working class. I'm solidly middle class, verging on upper middle class.

Since I'm retired, I don't actually "work." But I used to work. I was a computer systems analyst for the federal government. That made me what the smart set today call a "knowledge worker," meaning that everything I produced was a product of my brain. I didn't actually make things. But I did make certain "things" — specifically, computers — work better. The tools of my trade were items of knowledge that I held in my head, not tangible things I held in my hands.

Plus, I had a college degree ... in addition to, of course, my high school diploma.

My parents both came from families that were borderline working class. Dad's dad was a baker, except when there was no work to be found in that field, in which case he farmed some and scuffled some more. Mom's dad did a lot of scuffling, since his college education in a theological seminary was as a lay preacher, not a lucrative field by any means. After he decided his scuffling days were done, he became a (non-union) crane operator in a railroad roundhouse.

You could call both of my parents' families working class ... but in my estimation the better description would be lower middle class.

The working class proper used to include "blue-collar" workers who labored in factories with their hands. In the early twentieth century most of those salt-of-the-earth Americans were organized into unions. The unions fought for the rights of "labor" and often won ... at the expense of what was known derisively as "management."

Nowadays, if you factor out teachers' unions and those of other public-sector workers, unions in general are nowhere near as big or as powerful as they once were. And my granddad, the locomotive crane operator, got his working-class, ostensibly blue-collar job as a strikebreaker, I'm told.

Moreover, my investigations of the history of one of my favorite types of music, country music, have shown me that the term "working class" is customarily applied by scholars to its principal original audience, white Southerners who had more callouses on their hands than dollar bills in their pockets. These folks, often farmers, were never unionized. In fact, they hated unions.

A lot of those folks moved from the country and its nearby small towns to the big city, and after their standard of living rose with generally rising American prosperity in the years following World War II, they (or their children) moved to the suburbs. Today, those formerly "working class" families would probably say they're lower middle class or just plain middle class.

Yet it seems to me that it matters much that there is still a working class in America, composed of people doing various types of manual labor, producing "goods" rather than "services," doing so in factories, on farms, in mines, and in many other places.

It's important not to lose focus on those Americans because in today's economy it's downright hard, if not impossible, for them to move up the economic ladder, as earlier generations were able to do.

They typically don't have a college degree, and many lack a high-school diploma. Almost seventy years ago, at the end of WWII, that didn't matter much, for returning servicemen could go back to school on the G.I. Bill of Rights and climb the ladder that way. A decade or so earlier, during the Great Depression, the New Deal and the union movement offered ways of improving people's material circumstances. So for several decades of the twentieth century, climbing the ladder of success was quite possible for members of America's working class.

That's not the case today.

I'm reading Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith. It describes how the period from the mid-1940s, just after WWII, to the mid-1970s was a golden age for American prosperity, with people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder moving steadily up while the wealthy did all right, too. But after the middle of the 1970s, business interests began wielding unprecedented political power. The result was that for the last nearly 40 years the gains made by the economy as a whole have been hogged by the well-to-do, not shared with the workers who were, thanks to all sorts of increased efficiencies, producing ever more goods and services.

A lot of the working class became middle class in the three decades after WWII. But in the last three or four decades, the working class has stagnated. The sad result has been that we don't even talk about the working class any more.

Are Men Failing?

New York Times columnist David Brooks's recent "Why Men Fail" merits attention. Mr. Brooks's column summarizes a recent book by Hanna Rosin, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, to the effect that during the last 40 years, men in our culture have failed to demonstrate sufficient flexibility and have accordingly lost ground, while women have exhibited greater adaptablilty and, relatively speaking, have prospered.

Men's hyper-rigidity has doomed them to dropping out of the labor force in disturbing numbers, says Mr. Brooks, echoing Ms. Rosin. They more and more find themselves collecting disability compensation, and they are ceding the lead in jobs and, in some cases, even pay to women.

All because women are more adaptable.

Brooks contrasts Ms. Rosin's hypothesis with the older theory that men and boys have disadvantages that are at once cultural and genetic/neurological: so they fidget and daydream in school; they aren't "emotionally sensitive and aware of context" as adults; they can't "communicate smoothly" as employees.

I don't really know whether Rosin's hyper-rigidity thesis explains why little boys get more D's and F's in school than little girls do. Perhaps the old theory and the new hypothesis are both telling us something we need to know.

But Brooks's column says something else that is of great interest to me:

Rosin also reports from college campuses where women are pioneering new social arrangements. The usual story is that men are exploiting the new campus hookup culture in order to get plenty of sex without romantic commitments. Rosin argues that, in fact, women support the hookup culture. It allows them to have sex and fun without any time-consuming distractions from their careers. Like new immigrants, women are desperate to rise, and they embrace social and sexual rules that give them the freedom to focus on their professional lives.

"Desperate to rise" seems a bit wide of the mark. Desperate? Yet I bet Brooks is right that the hookup culture in colleges is chosen by women as a surrogate to committed relationships that might truncate their professional aspirations.

* * * * *

What if as a woman professional — specifically, a university professor — you are breast-feeding a baby, and you need to teach a class at baby's feeding time?

Under normal circumstances, working mothers can cope by pumping their breasts and feeding baby on expelled milk while in public. But American University professor Adrienne Pine ran into a situation where her baby was sick one morning and she had no good child-care options, so she brought her infant along to a 75-minute class she was teaching. I'm guessing that pumping was for some reason not an option in this situation. Once in the classroom, the baby grew restless, and "Pine breast-fed her while continuing her lecture in front of 40 students." So says this article in The Washington Post.

That sparked a controversy. "Some students [who were interviewed] said breast-feeding doesn’t belong in the classroom."

This was a feminist anthropology class, and Pine has since written that "I fed my sick baby [in it] without disrupting the lecture so as to not have to cancel the first day of class. I doubt anyone saw my nipple, because I’m pretty good at covering it. But if they did, they now know that I too, a university professor, like them, have nipples."

A sign of the times, I think. Beyond that, I'm not sure how I feel about this.

* * * * *

Another Washington Post story points up that both women and men today are, uh, desperate to enhance those bodily features that distinguish them from the other sex. "NJ woman charged with fatal penis enlargement injection pleads not guilty to manslaughter" says a 23-year-old man died the day after Kasia Rivera, 35, injected silicon into his penis, supposedly to lengthen it.

Kasia Rivera, charged with
reckless manslaughter in
penis-enlargement botch

According to Dr. Daniel S. Elliott, an associate professor of urology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.:

Enhancement procedures performed by unlicensed practitioners or people with no medical training are more commonly seen among women ... Liquid silicone is sought on the black market by women seeking to enhance their figures, even though it is not approved for cosmetic injections. Besides liquid silicone, injections of substances including paraffin, petroleum jelly and hydrogel have been illegally used to enlarge women’s breasts, hips and buttocks.

Of course, silicone breast and buttock implants (not liquid silicone) are often used cosmetically by women today.

Many men resort to other techniques to enlarge their penis. As far as I know, none of them work.

But why? Why the need for a bigger sex organ (men), bigger boobs and booties (women), and buffer bodies (both sexes)?

Both sexes, I think, realize they have to attract and then hold onto mates not just once or maybe twice in a lifetime, but maybe once or twice in a college semester. There's a continual lottery going on, from both sexes' point of view. A survival-of-the-sexiest, if you will.

It's a reflection of how long it takes to get a first-class education these days, a factor that affects both sexes, but also of the gender-specific need of today's women to hold firmly onto men's interest while at the same time keeping them at arm's length as they go for that advanced degree.

Meanwhile — dare I say it? — men feel increasingly emasculated. A bigger male member seems entirely in order. It makes them (us) feel more of a man.

As a 65-year-old, unmarried Catholic man, I personally favor chastity and abstinence. But I think it's unrealistic to expect that of young women and men who must wait many long years for marriage and children, owing to how long they're in school.

That same situation as it affects women, primarily, seems to be driving all I reported above. Young women must be abstinent — fat chance, for most of them — or use contraception. If contraception fails, then abortion is in order. Those are two realities today that Catholic authorities resent and reject.

But they and many other Catholics likewise resent the hookup culture, not to mention the seemingly excessive emphasis women and men are putting on their physical attributes.

And professors breast-feeding in front of their students will seem, to most Catholics, an affront to common decency.

We Catholics really need to come to grips with how much society has changed! That much I'm sure of, and for that change in Catholic attitude, I earnestly pray ...

Not Enough To Go Around? Let's Remedy That!

"There's not enough to go around!"

In this presidential election year, that's the overarching worry that's driving voter behavior, I take it.

Not enough income. Not enough wealth. Not enough jobs. Not enough economic opportunity.

When we hear President Obama's forces snipe at Mitt Romney about the girth of his bank account and the secrecy surrounding his tax returns, that's the not-so-hidden theme: Romney has gotten more than his fair share, and, as head of Bain Capital, he acquired it by zeroing out American jobs.

Romney snipes back that Obama is clueless about how wealth is created, which is why the current economic recovery is so anemic.

I have yet to hear either side tell how America can be returned to truly robust economic vigor. I think the president has, sadly, been notably silent about this topic.

Yes, we do get to see a few pieces of the respective economic jigsaw puzzles each candidate would try to put together if elected. Obama would let the "Bush-era" income tax cuts lapse for top earners, but leave them in place for the middle class. Romney would reduce all brackets' tax rates by 20 percent.

Obama would preserve Medicare's current way of doing things — though he hasn't really said how he'd head off the program's eventual insolvency. The Romney-Ryan ticket wants to convert Medicare to a voucher program for most yet-to-arrive-at-65 Americans.

Romney wants to solve the debt threat by drastically cutting programs, a full list of which which he has yet to announce, while generating more tax receipts (at albeit reduced tax rates) by "broadening the base" — eliminating or reducing itemized deductions and loopholes. Obama would cut federal programs more sparingly, while increasing tax rates sharply on upper incomes.

One approach or the other, or a mix of both, could shrink the deficit and thus keep the public debt from ballooning out of control, and that's a good, even necessary, thing.

Problem is, neither solution is aimed at enlarging the "economic pie." They represent two approaches to how after-tax income is allocated, addressing fairness-of-income-distribution concerns in two contrasting ways.

The two parties likewise exhibit two different attitudes toward expensive government entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid.

But what about making the economic pie much bigger than it is? Can't we agree that this is a goal we ought to pursue?

Can't we at least discuss it?

Here is problem number one with that, in my opinion: neither candidate really seems to have a clue about how to open up opportunity in this land to its fullest throttle, so more people could become better equipped to hold down ever more challenging jobs, thus enlarging the economic pie with their enhanced productivity.

Romney claims his experience as a businessman gives him the ability to manage the economy better than Obama. Well ... maybe.

But we know he killed or offshored jobs while at Bain; that was, supporters say, simply a much-needed bout of "creative destruction." I'm willing to accept that that kind of thing — putting American enterprise on a slimming diet — may sometimes be necessary for reasons of competitiveness abroad. But it's not the whole answer to growing our economic pie.

So, Mitt, what is the whole answer?

And how about you, Mr. President? Don't you have a plan to once again make America the fecund "land of opportunity" it once was?

If so, I for one haven't heard it.

Here's the kind of thing I think we need: How about a G.I. Bill, not just for servicemen and -women who have risked much in America's wars abroad, but for their children, too? The volunteer military is heavily weighted toward lower-income recruits whose kids may not get the opportunities Barack Obama's daughters and Mitt Romney's grandchildren will enjoy. Let's endow them all with the means to go to the very best schools for which they can qualify.

Meanwhile, I think we all need to get behind those conservative hobbyhorses, school vouchers, along with the parallel education revolution that seems to be exploding today, charter schools. True, vouchers-plus-charters needs to be augmented by serious reforms to traditional public schools, so they don't turn into warehouses for the least educable. And — sorry, NEA — I think teachers' unions will have to stand aside on this.

A G.I. Bill for "servicekids," as a variety of income redistribution, is a liberal notion. Mitt Romney could never embrace it. Vouchers-plus-charters-plus-union-disempowerment is a conservative notion. Barack Obama would never endorse that.

But if there's really not enough to go around these days, enriching opportunities for all demands that a lot of conventional orthodoxies be ushered into unceremonious retirement.

For instance, I propose that we get busy and pass the DREAM Act, the long-stalled-by-GOP-hard-liners congressional legislation that offers conditional amnesty to illegal immigrants in exchange for obtaining, or working diligently toward, a bachelor's degree or higher, or serving honorably in the U.S. military. They'd be helped along (this is not part of the current bill, unfortunately) by eligibility for Pell grants. If they go the military route instead, they'd come away with a sizable amount of training in IT, engineering skills, and the like, that will look great on their civilian résumés.

In addition, I'd pass state laws allowing children of illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuitions at state universities. Even Rick Perry, the conservative GOP governor of Texas, thinks anyone opposing this doesn't "have a heart."

Conservatives who blanch at those two proposals will grin at this one: I suggest we end the practice of affirmative action in hiring and college admissions based solely on race. Race-based affirmative action has outlived its usefulness, and it now just produces jealousies based on skin tone. In its place I would put affirmative action based strictly on socioeconomic factors. Smart working-class kids of any race who'd otherwise lack the slick résumés of the upper crusters would be given a leg up.

Get the point? We need to create a ladder of opportunity for all who now face an unadorned blank wall. This approach to the country's problems would tap the highest potential of all who live and work here, boosting their productivity and enlarging the economic pie for every one of us to feast on.

It would thus dispel the current atmosphere of fear, envy, class jealousy, financial greed, and worse. From the point of view of a Catholic voter like me, it would be a very Christian thing to do, since the current rancid, not-enough-to-go-around atmosphere is inimical to the spirit of Christian charity and poisonous to the milk of human kindness.