Class War I

A Commentary by William C. Shelton

This past weekend, I watched one of the Sunday news programs where the chattering class seriously debates points in what is, in reality, a shared and narrow worldview.  Tweedledee had the temerity to suggest that many Americans are struggling to make ends meet, and that we should reverse Bush‚Äôs tax cuts.  When Tweedledum predictably accused him of advocating ‚Äúclass war,‚Äù Tweedledee offered no effective response. 

For at least as long as I‚Äôve been alive, there‚Äôs been a class war‚Äîthe very wealthy and powerful against everyone else.  In recent years, the war has become more vicious.  So I started screaming at the television.

When the TV did not respond, I went over to my other living room‚ÄîTir na Nog, where the regulars tolerate my ravings.  One of them suggested that I write about it.  Now this may have been a clever ploy to divert my attention, but it worked. 

I tried writing, but I kept getting stuck.  Then I realized that I was trying to write two stories in one column: one objective and one subjective.  So this week, I‚Äôll write about the hard evidence that contradicts our love affair with myths of limitless opportunity and pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps.  Next column, I‚Äôll tell you why this nonsense angers me so deeply.

A central theme of America‚Äôs infectious optimism is the myth of the self-made man, or more recently, woman.  In fact, a New York Times poll last Spring found that 40% of Americans believe it is even easier to move up from one class to another now, than it was thirty years ago; 35% believe that it‚Äôs just as easy now as then.  Respondents said that hard work and a good education are more important to getting ahead than connections or a wealthy background. 46% said that it was easier to get ahead in the United States than in Europe.

None of these things is true.  This is the truth:

¬ß         Working people‚Äôs income has declined steadily since the mid 1970s.  The only time during this period that hourly pay increases were greater than inflation was during the late 90s speculative bubble.

¬ß         For every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent of the population, those in the top 0.1 percent ‚Äúearned‚Äù an additional $162 between 1950 and 1970, and $18,000 between 1990 and 2002,

¬ß         The real income of the bottom 90% of Americans fell from 1980 to 2002, while that of the top 0.1% increased two and a half times, before taxes.

¬ß         After the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000.

¬ß         The higher Americans are in income distribution, the longer they live, and the better health they enjoy.  This gap is growing.

¬ß         The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Bureau of Labor Statistics both found that, if you divide income distribution into fifths, fewer American families moved from a position in one fifth to the next highest fifth in the 1980s than in the 1990s.  Fewer still were upwardly mobile in the 1990s than in the 1980s. 

During the duck-and-cover days of the red scare, this nugget enjoyed recurring incarnations in the popular press: The average American works three days to buy a suit of clothes; the average Russian works two weeks.  Opaque to most Americans were the four Asians, three Latin Americans, and two Africans whose work at subsistence wages covered the remaining cost of the suit.

Now, the Asians at least, have developed an industrial base that allows very wealthy Americans to pay them $0.30 per hour to produce the same goods that Americans once made.  And the wealthy and powerful have used improved technology to eliminate jobs rather than sharing productivity gains with workers. 

One would think that these enormous gains would satisfy even the greediest.  But, with great wealth comes the ability to buy social policy at every level, from tax cuts to Assembly Square rezoning.  So the errand boys in the White House and on Capitol Hill slash taxes on the rich, while rolling up the social safety net.

This includes reducing federal and state commitments to what many see as the path to social mobility‚Äîaccessible higher education.  One in three Americans who go to college now drops out, as opposed to one in five in the 1960s.

As inequalities in wealth and income grow, social mobility declines, because disparities increase in the resources that families can invest in children.  You can‚Äôt pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you don‚Äôt own boots. 

We think of the U.K., France, and Germany as being ‚Äúclass societies.‚Äù  Yet social mobility is higher there than in the U.S., while inequalities in wealth are lower.

The same forces that produced these inequalities have eroded the institutions that once nurtured community and affirmed the authenticity of our own experiences.  Isolated, we are surrounded by an omnipresent image of everyone happily consuming.  This image obscures a great deal of misery and a yawning collective precipice of debt.  We imagine that if we are having a hard time, there must be something wrong with us.  And unless we realize that the misery is shared, the problem is systemic, and we are more powerful than we imagine, we face much harder times ahead.