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Take Back Our Party: Restoring the Democratic Legacy
Last edited Sun Dec 15, 2019, 09:39 PM - Edit history (1)
by James KwakWe live in troubled times.
Ordinary Americans are struggling. Despite decades of technological innovation and economic growth, the typical family’s net worth is no higher than in the 1980s. Health care costs, including rising insurance premiums, deductibles, co-payments, prescription drug prices, and often unexpected out-of-network charges, bankrupt a growing number of once-secure families. Young adults are burdened by student loan payments extending as far as they can see. Steeply rising rents make finding an affordable home virtually impossible in more and more cities. State and local governments are failing to deliver even essential services like clean water to their residents. A handful of companies controlled by billionaires have levels of control over our lives once imaginable only in science fiction. Increasingly precarious federal government finances threaten future reductions in the Social Security and Medicare benefits that many elderly Americans rely on. And decades of unsustainable growth have already profoundly changed the climate of our planet in ways we are only now beginning to realize.
Yet despite these disturbing developments, many people—particularly those who are well-off and well-educated—insist that nothing could be better. As of 2019, the United States is in the 11th year of an economic expansion that has seen the stock market rise and the unemployment rate fall to record levels. We remain enthralled by every year’s new marvels produced by the dream factories of the technology superpowers—self-driving cars, drone deliveries to your doorstep, virtual reality, space travel, and on and on. (The full realization of these wonders always seems just out of reach, but no matter.)
The explanation for this divergence is simple. Over the past 40 years, the economic fortunes of the very rich and more or less everyone else have become completely uncoupled. From 1980 to 2014, the total incomes of the top 1 percent more than tripled, while those of the bottom 50 percent remained essentially unchanged. The previous 34 years, from 1946 to 1980, saw the opposite pattern: Income growth was substantially higher for the bottom 50 percent than for the top 1 percent. If you have the money, you live in one economy, with the best health care in the world, easy access to green space, the finest restaurants that have ever existed, elite educational institutions from preschool through the most opulent research universities anywhere, and luxury goods and services that once were reserved for royalty. If you don’t have the money, you live in another economy, where your family’s welfare is vulnerable to sudden changes in the demand for your skills generated by distant markets, you breathe the dirty air produced by uncontrolled development or drink the toxic water delivered by a crumbling infrastructure, your children go to underfunded public schools, and you are rapidly being priced out of the health care your family needs.
Obviously there is no border wall that cleanly divides the very rich from everyone else. There is an intermediate zone, roughly from the 75th to the 95th income percentile, where people are more or less comfortable in a material sense. But they can see the speed with which the truly wealthy have separated themselves from the rest of society, and many of them are desperate not to be left behind—if not for themselves, then for their children. Anxiety about getting into a good college, landing choice summer internships, and securing a job at one of the handful of highly selective companies that promise entry into the economic elite—Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and their few peers—is at pathological levels. The recent college admissions cheating scandal is not only more proof that the very rich live in a different world from everyone else, but also shows that they, too, are desperate to place their children on the educational escalator to success and fortune. The forward march of inequality is there for anyone to see, and no one wants his or her family to be caught on the wrong side of history.
Ordinary Americans are struggling. Despite decades of technological innovation and economic growth, the typical family’s net worth is no higher than in the 1980s. Health care costs, including rising insurance premiums, deductibles, co-payments, prescription drug prices, and often unexpected out-of-network charges, bankrupt a growing number of once-secure families. Young adults are burdened by student loan payments extending as far as they can see. Steeply rising rents make finding an affordable home virtually impossible in more and more cities. State and local governments are failing to deliver even essential services like clean water to their residents. A handful of companies controlled by billionaires have levels of control over our lives once imaginable only in science fiction. Increasingly precarious federal government finances threaten future reductions in the Social Security and Medicare benefits that many elderly Americans rely on. And decades of unsustainable growth have already profoundly changed the climate of our planet in ways we are only now beginning to realize.
Yet despite these disturbing developments, many people—particularly those who are well-off and well-educated—insist that nothing could be better. As of 2019, the United States is in the 11th year of an economic expansion that has seen the stock market rise and the unemployment rate fall to record levels. We remain enthralled by every year’s new marvels produced by the dream factories of the technology superpowers—self-driving cars, drone deliveries to your doorstep, virtual reality, space travel, and on and on. (The full realization of these wonders always seems just out of reach, but no matter.)
The explanation for this divergence is simple. Over the past 40 years, the economic fortunes of the very rich and more or less everyone else have become completely uncoupled. From 1980 to 2014, the total incomes of the top 1 percent more than tripled, while those of the bottom 50 percent remained essentially unchanged. The previous 34 years, from 1946 to 1980, saw the opposite pattern: Income growth was substantially higher for the bottom 50 percent than for the top 1 percent. If you have the money, you live in one economy, with the best health care in the world, easy access to green space, the finest restaurants that have ever existed, elite educational institutions from preschool through the most opulent research universities anywhere, and luxury goods and services that once were reserved for royalty. If you don’t have the money, you live in another economy, where your family’s welfare is vulnerable to sudden changes in the demand for your skills generated by distant markets, you breathe the dirty air produced by uncontrolled development or drink the toxic water delivered by a crumbling infrastructure, your children go to underfunded public schools, and you are rapidly being priced out of the health care your family needs.
Obviously there is no border wall that cleanly divides the very rich from everyone else. There is an intermediate zone, roughly from the 75th to the 95th income percentile, where people are more or less comfortable in a material sense. But they can see the speed with which the truly wealthy have separated themselves from the rest of society, and many of them are desperate not to be left behind—if not for themselves, then for their children. Anxiety about getting into a good college, landing choice summer internships, and securing a job at one of the handful of highly selective companies that promise entry into the economic elite—Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and their few peers—is at pathological levels. The recent college admissions cheating scandal is not only more proof that the very rich live in a different world from everyone else, but also shows that they, too, are desperate to place their children on the educational escalator to success and fortune. The forward march of inequality is there for anyone to see, and no one wants his or her family to be caught on the wrong side of history.
Read more: https://prospect.org/politics/take-back-our-party-restoring-the-democratic-legacy/
(American Prospect)
