“Inequality is
in. The president, you have probably heard,
has declared income inequality to be ‘the defining challenge of our time.’
(Except he didn’t quite, but we’ll get to that.)”
From the start of his New York Times op-ed, tellingly titled “Inequality
for Dummies,” former editor-in-chief Bill Keller announces his strategies of diminishment
and dishonesty in addressing perhaps the most important political issue of our
time.
It sounds cute, when Keller confesses parenthetically, that
he is willfully misstating the President’s theme, but be not disarmed: the fact is, as Keller notes, some 4
paragraphs later, “President
Obama’s speech … was actually billed by the White House as a speech on economic
mobility. The equality he urged us to strive for was not equality of wealth but
equality of opportunity.”
This is, of
course, a distinction with a difference.
Keller almost immediately
endorses the President’s goal: “A stratified society in which the bottom and
top are mostly locked in place,” he says, “is not just morally offensive; it is
unstable.”
Then, he brings
in expert support for his thesis. “’The most pernicious fact of inequality is
when it translates into political inequality,’ said Daron Acemoglu, a co-author
of the book [Why Nations Fail] and a
Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist. ‘That means our democracy ceases
to function because some people have so much money they command greater power.’
The rich spend heavily on lobbyists and campaign donations to secure tax breaks
and tariff advantages and bailouts that perpetuate their status. Not only does
a dynamic economy stagnate, but the left-out citizenry becomes disillusioned
and cynical. Sound familiar?”
So, if President
Obama’s speech hit the bull’s-eye, why distort its meaning and then wait for 4
paragraphs to agree with it?
Because the
reality of inequality,-- economic, political, legal, and social,-- does not
interest Keller. What he wants to write
about is the public conversation about inequality, and how pathetic and,
ultimately futile it is.
Note Keller’s
gratuitously cynical lead: “Inequality is in.”
Even Keller will eventually admit that the reality of inequality is not
only real, but devastating, it’s the rhetoric of inequality he’s mad at. He
seems to believe his long-standing avoidance of the issue is a victimless
crime, while addressing inequality is a waste of time. In fact, his second paragraph is entirely focused
on another self-admiring confession of the unworthiness of his column. “If you traffic in opinions, as a pro or an
amateur, you’d better have opinions about inequality. And so I set off into the
intramural battlefield to see what’s up.”
Gee, he moans, I
feel so silly to be writing, even thinking about the disappearing American
dream of opportunity for all.
As for those who,
by talking so well about it, have forced him to devote a column to inequality,
Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio, are given the derogative label “progressive
idols,” and characterized as fanatical persecutors “of Liberals of a more
centrist bent — notably the former Clintonites at the Third Way think tank —
[who] have refused to join the chorus and been lashed by fellow Democrats for
their blasphemy.”
The idea of a
crowd of well-paid Clinton toadies clutching their testaments of triangulated belief
as they are led to the fiery stake by a mob of angry populists, attractive
though it may be, has as much to do with reality as Keller’s alleged secret
goal of the inequality critics: “forcing the rich to become poor.”
In Keller’s paper,
it seems the overdogs are always the victims of “class warfare. Poor babies.
The populists, who Keller
likes to call “the left-left,” a phrase that has no meaning at all, except a
reductive “off the cake,” are accused of a vengeful campaign to redistribute
wealth downward. They want, Keller says,
”to take from “the 1% … to subsidize the needs of the poor and middle class.”
That
means, Keller asserts, they “would string the safety net higher: expand Social
Security, hold Medicare inviolate, extend unemployment insurance, protect food
stamps, create more low-income housing.”
The
bastards! Those left-left lefties want
the people who have benefited most from America to contribute something closer
to the traditional share of their wealth to improve institutions and
infrastructure created for all Americans to use, schools, hospitals, highways
and bridges, airports and parklands.
They want Social Security to give old people better and, yes, more
secure lives. They want poor families
not to go hungry, or homeless.
And,
it should be noted, far from wanting Medicare to be inviolate, they want to
extend its coverage to more people while simultaneously making it a much
tougher price bargainer against the truly inefficient greed mills of the health
care and health insurance industries and Big Pharma.
Notwithstanding
this harsh stance against oligarchic pricing, populists are, to Keller, well-meaning
suckers, simpletons. They are dangerous
plaque in the bloodstream of progress.
Keller contrasts them with, “The center-left — and that includes
President Obama, most of the time — [which] sees the problem and the solutions
as more complicated. [They understand] you also need to create opportunity,
which means, first and foremost, jobs. Yes, you can raise taxes on the rich,
but you don’t want to punish success.”
But
much of Warren’s and DiBlasio’s programs have nothing to do with punishing
success. They are about creating jobs,
construction and engineering jobs, teaching and service-providing jobs, and by using
the tax codes and enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, bringing back to
America some of the jobs that have gone abroad, mostly to places with low
wages, high corruption and lax environmental protection.
As
his piece develops, Keller continues his contrast between the extremists and
moderates by demeaning the former and dreaming up false dichotomies that allow
him to praise the latter (who are, after all, the same people who presided
over, even fostered, the inequality gap in the first place.) “The populists,” he says, simply want to give your tax dollars away,
“putting more money in the hands of the bottom and middle, who will then spend
us back to economic vigor. This is classic Keynesian thinking, largely
vindicated by history.”
That’s it, he says, that’s the populist program: confiscation and redistribution, of the foreign, if proven, Keynesian sort. In contrast, he notes with approval, “In a line from his speech that was not widely quoted, President Obama said, ‘The fact is if you’re a progressive and you want to help the middle class and the working poor, you’ve still got to be concerned about competitiveness and productivity and business confidence that spurs private-sector investment.’”
Keller actually gives a good translation of what the President’s generalities mean: “While closing loopholes, Obama would also lower corporate tax rates; he would do trade deals to expand our diminishing share of foreign markets; he would shrink long-term deficits and streamline regulations.”
Obama would attack the inequality injustice by protecting corporate profits, heading back to historic highs, from taxation, and by doing trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which I discussed in an earlier post, as a way to re-empower the powerful multinational corporations of media, pharmaceuticals and energy, at the expense of consumers and netizens worldwide.
http://davemarashsez.blogspot.com/2013/11/its-not-what-theyre-seeking-its-what.html
There is no evidence that these “trade deals” do “expand our diminishing share of foreign markets.” Quite the contrary, they reward the job exporters.
TTP will globalize the kind
of ruinous deregulation those Clinton “moderates” imposed on the American
economy. How “moderate” is that?
“The second
argument,” separating the loony from the lovable, Keller says, “is over
entitlements. The left tends
to treat entitlements as sacred,” he lies, while “centrists favor measures to
slow the growth of entitlements.”
Nope. Both groups acknowledge a need to slow the
growth of entitlement. The disagreement
is over how to do it. Here’s Keller’s “moderates’”
formula: “using a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) formula that more accurately
reflects how people spend, cutting benefits for those who don’t really need
them, possibly extending the retirement age a couple of years, and using the
government’s leverage to drive down the costs of medical care.”
A populist plan would
include some of the same items, but turn the priorities upside down. First, not last, would be to restructure
entitlement services to allow more government cost and performance controls and
fewer open-ended cost-plus contracts. Second,
would be tax reform that, by slightly steepening the graduation curve on everyone’s
income taxes would obviate the need to
figure out who “needs” their social security benefits, or precisely what
COLA does reflect the cost of living. If the rich or the undeserving non-poor get
too much, the IRS will get it back.
On the question
of retirement age, populists worry less about forcing older people to work
longer, than they do about the non-retirees keeping jobs that might go to unemployed younger
workers. Keller mentions neither of
these “complications” to an argument he simplifies for “the Dummies.”
“A third
difference between the near left and the far left,” says the Simplifier, “is
the question of making government more efficient.”
It seems, only
the moderates want that. “In education,
health care, Social Security and other areas, the center seems more receptive
to reforms intended to get decent results at lower costs. Further left, reform
is seen as a euphemism for taking stuff away.
Of course, the
“entitlement reforms” Keller praises do consist almost entirely of takeaways
from the poor, the sick and the elderly.
But “reform” is
just a word, a label every bit as useful as “moderate,” “left” and “left-left,”
and as susceptible to abuse.
Take “education
reform,” the determination to pay edu-corp contractors to design standardized
tests to measure un-standard-izable children, and draw from them, consequential
conclusions about the quality of their teachers. Who is guilty here of criminal simplification
of extremely complex social and pedagogical issues? Seems to me it’s those “moderates,” and the
“education reformers” who sell them these bogus tests.
Education reform alone
cannot succeed without social service reform to help all students realize the
opportunities a classroom can provide.
Teachers by themselves cannot overcome their students’ long-known disadvantages
of poverty, cultural marginalization, and family disintegration, but more and
better government provision of educational, recreational and counseling
services can certainly mitigate them.
As bad as Keller’s cynical lead may be, his declaration of futility at the close is even worse. “Barring a purge of Congress,” Keller says, “most of the ideas put forth by the liberals, center-left or left-left, are going nowhere in the partisan sludge pit that is Washington.”
From his “Why am I writing about this?” at the top, he bottoms out with a “Why bother?” at the end.
Inequality may be real, may be destroying America, but it ain’t gonna change. And isn’t it brave to say so?
No, it is not. Bravery means admitting that real reform requires displacing powerful, but illegitimate interests, and honestly taking them on. This is the opposite of the “healthcare reform” of the Affordable Care Act, which displaced nobody in power, just handed a freshly marked deck of cards to the health industry’s institutional elite to use to fleece their customers.
Before we punish the practitioners of such success, we should punish their enablers: politicians and pundits alike.
