Open Mic November 4

Mono:

Econ­o­mists say Fed­eral spend­ing cre­ates jobs, but in the fol­low­ing order per $1B spent:

• edu­ca­tion (29,100)

Do you know if those 29,100 jobs /​ $1B are all direct jobs (teach­ers, admin­is­tra­tors, jan­i­tors, etc.)? Or does it include the jobs that are also cre­ated 20 years later when the peo­ple who have an ade­quate edu­ca­tion enter the work­force or become entrepreneurs?

Relat­ing fur­ther to our ongo­ing dis­cus­sion of the increas­ing income dis­par­ity in Amer­ica, see here.

Sorry, Grog. I did the search, hav­ing read the arti­cle else­where. I wanted to find the arti­cle online so I could post a link. I posted the search instead. Slow brain today. (Give me a break. I’ve had a fever for a week )

I’ve cor­rected the link, and I include it also here: http://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2​0​1​1​/​1​1​/​0​4​/​o​p​i​n​i​o​n​/​o​l​i​g​a​r​c​h​y​-​a​m​e​r​i​c​a​n​-​s​t​y​l​e​.​h​tml

It is indeed a big story, fop­plssiegeparty. But as any global-​​warming denier will tell you, the amount of green­houses gasses in the atmos­phere has no impact what­ever on any sup­posed green­house effect, and will have no impact on the climate.

Or else it will have such an insignif­i­cant effect that we shouldn’t care about it.

Or we can’t prove it has any effect (because we can’t put the Earth into a lab­o­ra­tory and have a sep­a­rate con­trol Earth with­out the green­house gasses), so we should just ignore it.

Or the Earth goes through nat­ural cycles over mil­lions of years that are greater than this, so it’s not worth think­ing about.

Or we should learn to make a profit off it.

Or it’s too late to worry about, so let’s party!

Or it’s too expen­sive to fix it (i.e., “I can’t be both­ered, so shut up!”)

Or some­thing.

Thank you,. Grog. I’m on meds, and feel­ing actu­ally human today. I had some fun dreams the last few nights, how­ever

Grog,

If his­tory shows where rebel­lion broke out because one class got rich at a slower pace than another group,

I have to dis­pute your claim here that we’re all get­ting “rich,” only slowly.

The rea­son I dis­pute it is that words like “rich” and “poor” are rel­a­tive terms — not only rel­a­tive to each other, but rel­a­tive to the time and place. You have pointed out that America’s poor have more than, say, the poor of Soma­lia, or the poor of Edwar­dian Eng­land. But that’s not who America’s poor (or mid­dle class, for that mat­ter) com­pare them­selves to.

A col­lege grad­u­ate today in Amer­ica is less likely to get a job that gives health ben­e­fits or a pen­sion than a high school grad back in 1979. America’s mid­dle class is bet­ter off (in terms of things owned, but in nearly no other sense) than it was 30 years ago — but has almost stag­nated com­pared to ten years ago (vir­tu­ally all the “growth” of the last 30 years hap­pened before Bush 2 took office). Mean­while, the peo­ple we really do com­pare our­selves to — the top few per­cent — have gob­bled up nearly all the nation’s growth.

We’re not blind to the fact that they kept get­ting richer, even as they threw us out of work. We don’t ignore that we’ve stag­nated while they’ve got­ten far wealth­ier (the top 0.1% get­ting 400% richer in the last decade while we went nowhere).

At no time in his­tory, at no place on earth, do the com­mon folk com­pare them­selves to the dirt-​​poor of other times or other places. We com­pare our own lot and progress (or lack of it) against our own society’s élite. And it makes sense that we do, because the ques­tion isn’t “Are we bet­ter off now than cave­men used to be?” The ques­tion is, “Are we shar­ing rea­son­ably in the growth of our own soci­ety, the soci­ety that we are building?”

The bot­tom 80% of Amer­i­cans own less than 50% of the coun­try. The top 1 or 2 per­cent own about 40% of it, and their share expands year by year, day by day.

This is not merely a ques­tion of income inequity. It is also a ques­tion of power and influ­ence. Own­er­ship is con­trol; they don’t just own Amer­ica, they increas­ingly con­trol it. They’re not just wealthy, they’re pow­er­ful, and they con­trol our jobs, our enter­tain­ments, our pol­i­tics, our access to health ser­vices, our retire­ment prospects, our free­doms, the things we see and hear and the things we learn. Even as their wealth expands, pub­lic libraries close, bridges crum­ble, pub­lic schools fall into dis­re­pair, test scores fall, ever-​​larger per­cent­ages of our pop­u­la­tion rot in jails, spoon-​​fed pro­pa­ganda sub­sti­tutes for news report­ing, and health care gets more expen­sive and less effective.

Mod­ern con­ser­v­a­tive poli­cies and talk­ing points are designed to trans­fer more wealth and power to the élites. We’ve proven what hap­pens when we dereg­u­late and slash spend­ing and cut taxes for the wealthy; they get richer, and the rest of soci­ety sick­ens. We just had the worst eco­nomic down­turn in nearly a cen­tury as a direct result of the poli­cies which the Repub­li­cans are now dou­bling down on.

Insist­ing that we’re all get­ting rich — just slower than some other folks — misses the point, besides being dishonest.

MW,

It’s odd. The con­ser­v­a­tive line is that Rich Peo­ple won’t cre­ate jobs if we don’t give them tax cuts. Rich Peo­ple won’t even bother to work any­more if we raise their taxes by a measly cou­ple of per­cent. But every­one else should be grate­ful for the scraps that Rich Peo­ple choose to tin­kle down onto us while they get immensely wealth­ier. Every­one Else should be happy lit­tle worker ants because we’re doing bet­ter than coal min­ers did in Dick­ens’ time.

How come we are sup­posed to be moti­vated by and joy­ful for “advances” that are only a tiny frac­tion of what the “job cre­ators” would find too piti­fully small to even get out of bed for?

Let’s swap per­cent­age growth for the next three decades or so. That seems fair, doesn’t it? Or is “fair” defined as “400% growth for the top 0.1% and near-​​stagnation for a decade for every­one else”?

Grog, on your ques­tion of whether a given gen­er­a­tion com­pares itself to pre­vi­ous (or future) gen­er­a­tions — I well remem­ber my grand­par­ents lament­ing that things were dif­fer­ent in their day, some­times bet­ter, some­times worse. I’m sure every gen­er­a­tion does that. But I’ve yet to hear any­one say, “We’ve got things bet­ter than they did, so let’s rest on our laurels.”

The French Rev­o­lu­tion did not hap­pen because of inter­gen­er­a­tional rival­ries. It hap­pened because the royal hered­i­tary élites were keep­ing the wealth of the nation to them­selves. The same for the Russ­ian rev­o­lu­tion. The same for nearly every rev­o­lu­tion (exam­ple: Libya).

If I’m doing bet­ter than my par­ents did, and I have rea­son­able expec­ta­tions that my chil­dren will do bet­ter than me, I’m gen­er­ally sat­is­fied (unless I also rea­son­ably believe that we could do bet­ter still if the oli­garchs were not keep­ing most of the wealth for themselves).

In increas­ing num­bers, Amer­i­cans today do not believe their chil­dren will do bet­ter; most of the young peo­ple believe their lot will be worse than that of their par­ents; and most adults are con­vinced things are worse now than they were under Clin­ton (and they’re right). The trend line is unmis­tak­able. No amount of insis­tence that we should be sat­is­fied with the mea­ger growth we’ve had, while the top few per­cent con­tinue to get immensely richer (“Let them eat cake!”) is going to mol­lify that jus­ti­fied anger.

As has been pointed out, the argu­ment you’re advanc­ing (the choice is between our own piti­ful growth while the income gap bal­loons, or else every­one stag­nates) is a false  choice. We’ve already seen that the true choice is between the wealthy con­tin­u­ing to gain wealth and power at our expense, or hav­ing every­one ben­e­fit through a robust and pros­per­ing mid­dle class.