Today marks my re-entry into blogging after a several month long hiatus for a number of personal reasons. Didn't feel like doing it, so I didn't. I figured if my heart wasn't in it, then there was really no point. That being said, I'm glad to be back on (off?) the wagon. It's a new year - an election year no less - and there is bound to be an innumerate amount of issues to write about and discuss.
Issues like this one:
But many researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward center stage.
[...]
At least five large studies in recent years have found the United States to be less mobile than comparable nations. A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints.
[...]
While liberals often complain that the United States has unusually large income gaps, many conservatives have argued that the system is fair because mobility is especially high, too: everyone can climb the ladder. Now the evidence suggests that America is not only less equal, but also less mobile.
[...]
In 2006 Professor Corak reviewed more than 50 studies of nine countries. He ranked Canada, Norway, Finland and Denmark as the most mobile, with the United States and Britain roughly tied at the other extreme. Sweden, Germany, and France were scattered across the middle.
Read the whole thing. As the article says, the issue isn't that people don't have money or decent paying jobs (although that is obviously a separate issue) but rather that the American Dream is under assault. That is, it is increasingly statistically difficult, if not impossible, to be born in one economic strata and be able to move to a higher one through sheer force of will and hard work. That was the essence of the American Dream - that anyone that played by the rules and had an exceptional work ethic could become upper middle class, or at least significantly better themselves. Not so anymore, at least in most cases. That fairy tale has been left behind in our collective rear view mirror in the 1950s. And don't be fooled by the financial crisis/recession - this has been decades in the making.
This is what happens when the de facto economic policy of the US is wildly tilted towards the highest echelons of the economic ladder in hopes that magical fairies and wildly generous and wealthy benefactors will trickle down their gains and table scraps to the rest of us. You'll note that the common denominator here is that the countries in the article with superior economic mobility do not subscribe to such fantasies. They have higher taxes on the high earners/wealth (sorry - the job creators) and don't believe in the infantile fallacy that if you give the wealthy shit for free, they give it away to the rest of us and make it rain because they are just that generous.
Occupy Wall Street is a start, and a good one at that. And people outside the movement are even starting to catch on - despite the abject failure of Washington and both political parties (with heavier blame on the GOP), public opinion wildly favors progressive economic policies. And I would venture to guess that a solid majority of the country would be very pleased with the results of a true progressive tax code and higher taxation on those who have done well if they would simply remove their heads from their collective asses and realize that they themselves are a part of the very statistics that this article details. This is what the 2012 election should be about (but probably won't be). Hopefully this dialog will continue into the future. Our political overlords would be incredibly stupid to ignore the dialog that OWS has started.
No comments:
Post a Comment