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Billzz
Guest
"Sid9" <sid9@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:E%iIi.74739$Lu.68571@bignews8.bellsouth.net...
> September 18, 2007, 11:45 pm
> Introducing This Blog
> "I was born in 1953. Like the rest of my generation, I took the America I
> grew up in for granted - in fact, like many in my generation I railed
> against the very real injustices of our society, marched against the
> bombing of Cambodia, went door to door for liberal candidates. It's only
> in retrospect that the political and economic environment of my youth
> stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional episode in our nation's
> history."
>
> That's the opening paragraph of my new book, The Conscience of a Liberal.
> It's a book about what has happened to the America I grew up in and why, a
> story that I argue revolves around the politics and economics of
> inequality.
>
> I've given this New York Times blog the same name, because the politics
> and economics of inequality will, I expect, be central to many of the blog
> posts - although I also expect to be posting on a lot of other issues,
> from health care to high-speed Internet access, from productivity to poll
> analysis. Many of the posts will be supplements to my regular columns;
> I'll be using this space to present the kind of information I can't
> provide on the printed page - especially charts and tables, which are
> crucial to the way I think about most of the issues I write about.
>
> In fact, let me start this blog off with a chart that's central to how I
> think about the big picture, the underlying story of what's really going
> on in this country. The chart shows the share of the richest 10 percent of
> the American population in total income - an indicator that closely tracks
> many other measures of economic inequality - over the past 90 years, as
> estimated by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. I've added
> labels indicating four key periods. These are:
>
>
> The Long Gilded Age: Historians generally say that the Gilded Age gave way
> to the Progressive Era around 1900. In many important ways, though, the
> Gilded Age continued right through to the New Deal. As far as we can tell,
> income remained about as unequally distributed as it had been the late
> 19th century - or as it is today. Public policy did little to limit
> extremes of wealth and poverty, mainly because the political dominance of
> the elite remained intact; the politics of the era, in which working
> Americans were divided by racial, religious, and cultural issues, have
> recognizable parallels with modern politics.
>
> The Great Compression: The middle-class society I grew up in didn't evolve
> gradually or automatically. It was created, in a remarkably short period
> of time, by FDR and the New Deal. As the chart shows, income inequality
> declined drastically from the late 1930s to the mid 1940s, with the rich
> losing ground while working Americans saw unprecedented gains. Economic
> historians call what happened the Great Compression, and it's a seminal
> episode in American history.
>
> Middle class America: That's the country I grew up in. It was a society
> without extremes of wealth or poverty, a society of broadly shared
> prosperity, partly because strong unions, a high minimum wage, and a
> progressive tax system helped limit inequality. It was also a society in
> which political bipartisanship meant something: in spite of all the
> turmoil of Vietnam and the civil rights movement, in spite of the sinister
> machinations of Nixon and his henchmen, it was an era in which Democrats
> and Republicans agreed on basic values and could cooperate across party
> lines.
>
> The great divergence: Since the late 1970s the America I knew has
> unraveled. We're no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits
> of economic growth are widely shared: between 1979 and 2005 the real
> income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the
> richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.
>
> Most people assume that this rise in inequality was the result of
> impersonal forces, like technological change and globalization. But the
> great reduction of inequality that created middle-class America between
> 1935 and 1945 was driven by political change; I believe that politics has
> also played an important role in rising inequality since the 1970s. It's
> important to know that no other advanced economy has seen a comparable
> surge in inequality - even the rising inequality of Thatcherite Britain
> was a faint echo of trends here.
>
> On the political side, you might have expected rising inequality to
> produce a populist backlash. Instead, however, the era of rising
> inequality has also been the era of "movement conservatism," the term both
> supporters and opponents use for the highly cohesive set of interlocking
> institutions that brought Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich to power, and
> reached its culmination, taking control of all three branches of the
> federal government, under George W. Bush. (Yes, Virginia, there is a vast
> right-wing conspiracy.)
>
> Because of movement conservative political dominance, taxes on the rich
> have fallen, and the holes in the safety net have gotten bigger, even as
> inequality has soared. And the rise of movement conservatism is also at
> the heart of the bitter partisanship that characterizes politics today.
>
> Why did this happen? Well, that's a long story - in fact, I've written a
> whole book about it, and also about why I believe America is ready for a
> big change in direction.
>
> For now, though, the important thing is to realize that the story of
> modern America is, in large part, the story of the fall and rise of
> inequality.
I am old enough to remember when the Democrats held both houses of Congress,
and the Presidency, and did nothing to address this issue. And I am also
old enough to remember when the Republicans held both houses of Congress,
and the Presidency, and did nothing to address this issue.
news:E%iIi.74739$Lu.68571@bignews8.bellsouth.net...
> September 18, 2007, 11:45 pm
> Introducing This Blog
> "I was born in 1953. Like the rest of my generation, I took the America I
> grew up in for granted - in fact, like many in my generation I railed
> against the very real injustices of our society, marched against the
> bombing of Cambodia, went door to door for liberal candidates. It's only
> in retrospect that the political and economic environment of my youth
> stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional episode in our nation's
> history."
>
> That's the opening paragraph of my new book, The Conscience of a Liberal.
> It's a book about what has happened to the America I grew up in and why, a
> story that I argue revolves around the politics and economics of
> inequality.
>
> I've given this New York Times blog the same name, because the politics
> and economics of inequality will, I expect, be central to many of the blog
> posts - although I also expect to be posting on a lot of other issues,
> from health care to high-speed Internet access, from productivity to poll
> analysis. Many of the posts will be supplements to my regular columns;
> I'll be using this space to present the kind of information I can't
> provide on the printed page - especially charts and tables, which are
> crucial to the way I think about most of the issues I write about.
>
> In fact, let me start this blog off with a chart that's central to how I
> think about the big picture, the underlying story of what's really going
> on in this country. The chart shows the share of the richest 10 percent of
> the American population in total income - an indicator that closely tracks
> many other measures of economic inequality - over the past 90 years, as
> estimated by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. I've added
> labels indicating four key periods. These are:
>
>
> The Long Gilded Age: Historians generally say that the Gilded Age gave way
> to the Progressive Era around 1900. In many important ways, though, the
> Gilded Age continued right through to the New Deal. As far as we can tell,
> income remained about as unequally distributed as it had been the late
> 19th century - or as it is today. Public policy did little to limit
> extremes of wealth and poverty, mainly because the political dominance of
> the elite remained intact; the politics of the era, in which working
> Americans were divided by racial, religious, and cultural issues, have
> recognizable parallels with modern politics.
>
> The Great Compression: The middle-class society I grew up in didn't evolve
> gradually or automatically. It was created, in a remarkably short period
> of time, by FDR and the New Deal. As the chart shows, income inequality
> declined drastically from the late 1930s to the mid 1940s, with the rich
> losing ground while working Americans saw unprecedented gains. Economic
> historians call what happened the Great Compression, and it's a seminal
> episode in American history.
>
> Middle class America: That's the country I grew up in. It was a society
> without extremes of wealth or poverty, a society of broadly shared
> prosperity, partly because strong unions, a high minimum wage, and a
> progressive tax system helped limit inequality. It was also a society in
> which political bipartisanship meant something: in spite of all the
> turmoil of Vietnam and the civil rights movement, in spite of the sinister
> machinations of Nixon and his henchmen, it was an era in which Democrats
> and Republicans agreed on basic values and could cooperate across party
> lines.
>
> The great divergence: Since the late 1970s the America I knew has
> unraveled. We're no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits
> of economic growth are widely shared: between 1979 and 2005 the real
> income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the
> richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.
>
> Most people assume that this rise in inequality was the result of
> impersonal forces, like technological change and globalization. But the
> great reduction of inequality that created middle-class America between
> 1935 and 1945 was driven by political change; I believe that politics has
> also played an important role in rising inequality since the 1970s. It's
> important to know that no other advanced economy has seen a comparable
> surge in inequality - even the rising inequality of Thatcherite Britain
> was a faint echo of trends here.
>
> On the political side, you might have expected rising inequality to
> produce a populist backlash. Instead, however, the era of rising
> inequality has also been the era of "movement conservatism," the term both
> supporters and opponents use for the highly cohesive set of interlocking
> institutions that brought Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich to power, and
> reached its culmination, taking control of all three branches of the
> federal government, under George W. Bush. (Yes, Virginia, there is a vast
> right-wing conspiracy.)
>
> Because of movement conservative political dominance, taxes on the rich
> have fallen, and the holes in the safety net have gotten bigger, even as
> inequality has soared. And the rise of movement conservatism is also at
> the heart of the bitter partisanship that characterizes politics today.
>
> Why did this happen? Well, that's a long story - in fact, I've written a
> whole book about it, and also about why I believe America is ready for a
> big change in direction.
>
> For now, though, the important thing is to realize that the story of
> modern America is, in large part, the story of the fall and rise of
> inequality.
I am old enough to remember when the Democrats held both houses of Congress,
and the Presidency, and did nothing to address this issue. And I am also
old enough to remember when the Republicans held both houses of Congress,
and the Presidency, and did nothing to address this issue.
