- ‘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. Postwar America America
- ‘It’s hard to make the case that Democrats have moved significantly to the left: On economic issues from welfare to taxes, Bill Clinton arguably governed not just to the right of Jimmy Carter, but to the right of Richard Nixon. On the other side it’s obvious that Republicans have moved to the right.’ (5)
- ‘The empowerment of the hard right emboldened business to launch an all-out attack on the union movement, drastically reducing workers’ bargaining power; freed business executives from the political and social constraints that had previously placed limits on runaway executive paychecks’ sharply reduced tax rates on high incomes; and in a variety of other ways promoted rising inequality.’ (7)
- ‘When economists, startled by rising inequality, began looking back at the origins of middle-class America, they discovered to their surprise that the transition from the inequality of the Gilded Age to the relative equality of the postwar era wasn’t a gradual evolution. Instead, America Roosevelt administration – especially through wartime wage controls.’ (7)
- ‘Now you might have expected inequality to spring back to its former levels once wartime controls were removed. It turned out, however, that the relatively equal distribution of income created by FDR persisted for more than thirty years. This strongly suggests that institutions, norms, and the political environment matter a lot more for the distribution of income – and that impersonal market forces matter less – than Economics 101 might lead you to believe.’ (8)
- ‘If the rise in inequality has political roots, the United States should stand out; if it’s mainly due to impersonal market forces, trends in inequality should have been similar across the advanced world. And the fact is that the increase in U.S. Britain Europe and Japan
- ‘People can and do make entire careers within this network, secure in the knowledge that political loyalty will be rewarded no matter what happens. A liberal who botched a war and then violated ethics rules to reward his lover might be worried about his employment prospects; Paul Wolfowitz had a chair waiting for him at the American Enterprise Institute.’ (10)
- ‘Money is the glue of movement conservatism, which is largely financed by a handful of extremely wealthy individuals and a number of major corporations, all of whom stand to gain from increased inequality, an end to progressive taxation, and a rollback of the welfare state – in short, from a reversal of the New Deal. And turning the clock back on economic policies that limit inequality is, at its core, what movement conservatism is all about.’ (10)
- ‘One key message of this book, which many readers may find uncomfortable, is that race is at the heart of what has happened to the country I grew up in. The legacy of slavery, America America
- ‘It’s starting to look as if the 2004 election was movement conservatism’s last hurrah.’ (12)
- ‘But the war did go badly – and that was not an accident. When Bush moved into the White House, movement conservatism finally found itself in control of all the levers of power – and quickly proved itself unable to govern. The movement’s politicization of everything, the way it values political loyalty above all else, creates a culture of cronyism and corruption that has pervaded everything the Bush administration does, from the failed reconstruction of Iraq
- ‘Anything can happen in the 2008 election, but it looks like a reasonable guess that by 2009 America will have a Democratic president and a solidly Democratic Congress. Moreover, this new majority, if it emerges, will be much more ideologically cohesive than the Democratic majority of Bill Clinton’s first two years, which was an uneasy alliance between Northern liberals and conservative Southerners. The question is, what should the new majority do? My answer is that it should, for the nation’s sake, pursue an unabashedly liberal program of expanding the social safety net and reducing inequality – a new New Deal. The starting point for that program, the twenty-first century equivalent of Social Security, should be universal health care, something every other advanced country already has.’ (13-14)
- ‘Unfortunately the family features that seem to have reemerged in your face after skipping a generation are deeply unattractive. Pre-New Deal America, like America in the early twenty-first century, was a land of vast inequality in wealth and power, in which a nominally democratic political system failed to represent the economic interests of the majority.’ (15)
Highest-income 10% | Highest-income 1% | |
Average for 1920s | 43.6% | 17.3% |
2005 | 44.3% | 17.4% |
(16)
- ‘Now, it’s true that the oligarchic nature of pre-New Deal politics and the often bloody way the power of the state was used to protect property interests were more extreme than anything we see today. Meanwhile, though the inequality of income was no greater than it is now, the inequality of income was much greater, because there were none of the social programs that now create a safety net, however imperfect, for the less fortunate.’ (16)
- ‘The income tax was reintroduced in 1913, together with a constitutional amendment that prevented the Supreme Court from declaring, as it had before, that it was unconstitutional.’ (17)
- ‘The persistence of extreme inequality right through the Jazz Age is a first piece of evidence for one of this book’s central points: Middle-class societies don’t emerge automatically as an economy matures, they have to be created through political action.’ (18)
- ‘During the first few decades after World War II, the inequalities of the Gilded Age became a thing of myth, a type of society that nobody thought would return – except that now it has. The high level of inequality during the Long Gilded Age [1870-1930], like high inequality today, partly reflected the weak bargaining position of labor.’ (19)
- ‘High inequality didn’t mean that workers failed to share any of the fruits of progress. While inequality was great, it was more or less stable, so that the growth of the U.S.
- ‘These improvements, however, shouldn’t lead us to gloss over the persistence of real deprivation. At the close of the twenties many American workers still lived in grinding poverty…since income support programs currently account for most of the income of the poorest fifth of Americans, being poor in the 1920s was a far harsher experience than it is today.’ (20)
- ‘Republicans, who began as the party of free labor but by the 1870s had undeniably become the party of big business and the rich, won twelve of the sixteen presidential elections between the Civil War and the Great Depression. They controlled the Senate even more consistently, with Democrats holding a majority in only five of the era’s thirty-two Congresses.’ (21-22)
- ‘What accounts for this prolonged conservative dominance in a country in which demands to tax the rich and help the needy should, by the numbers, have had mass appeal? The explanation involved several factors that are all too familiar from today’s political scene, but were present in an exaggerated form. First there was the effective disenfranchisement of many American workers.’ (22)
- ‘The problem of disenfranchisement has returned in contemporary America, thanks to a large-scale illegal immigration and the continuing low voting participation of blacks – aided by systematic vote suppression that is more subtle than that of Jim Crow days, but nonetheless can be decisive in close elections.’ (23)
- ‘Finally there was pervasive election fraud [in the Long Gilded Age]. Both parties did it, in a variety of ways.’ (24)
- ‘Most of the time, the conservative forces that sustained the Long Gilded Age didn’t require an equivalent to today’s disciplined movement conservatism to triumph. There was no need for an interlocking set of special institutions, Mafia-like in their demand for loyalty, to promulgate conservative thought, reward the faithful, and intimidate the press and any dissenters. There was no need to form alliances with religious fundamentalists, no need to exploit morality and lifestyle issues. And there was no need to distort foreign policy or engage in convenient foreign wars to distract the public.’ (25-26)
- ‘The immigrant share of the population peaked in 1910 at 14.7 percent, with the vast majority in urban areas and particularly concentrated in the biggest cities. In that year 41 percent of New Yorkers were foreign born…These immigrants were treated with the same kind of horror, the same claims that they could never become real Americans, that now characterizes the most extreme reaction to Mexican immigrants.’ (27-28)
- ‘In short, during the Long Gilded Age – as in today’s America – cultural and racial divisions among those with shared common economic interests prevented the emergence of an effective political challenge to extreme economic inequality.’ (31)
- ‘We shouldn’t ignore the fact that there were a fair number of genuinely dangerous radicals around. In particular there were surely far more communists and anarchists in America
- ‘What changed everything, of course, was the Great Depression, which made the New Deal possible.’ (35)
- ‘Eventually, however, there was both the political will and the leadership for a true liberal program. Where Bryan
- ‘ America
- ‘Michael Harrington wrote The Other America to remind people that not all Americans were, in fact, members of the middle class – but a large part of the reason he felt such a book was needed was because poverty was no longer a majority condition, and hence tended to disappear from view.’ (38)
- ‘Social injustice remained pervasive: Segregation still ruled in the South, and both overt racism and overt discrimination against women were the norm throughout the country. Yet ordinary workers and their families had good reason to feel that they were sharing in the nation’s prosperity as never before.’ (38)
- ‘Yet where the Great Depression lives on in our memory, the Great Compression has been largely forgotten. The achievement of a middle-class society, which once seemed an impossible dream, came to be taken for granted.’ (39)
- ‘Levitt’s achievement was partly based on the application to civilian housing of construction techniques that had been used during the war to build army barracks.’ (40-41)
- ‘In fact the United States didn’t have a formal official definition of poverty, let alone an official estimate of the number of people below the poverty line, until one was created in 1964 to help Lyndon Johnson formulate goals for the Great Society.’ (41)
- ‘By the mid-fifties the real after-tax incomes of the richest 1 percent of Americans were probably 20 or 30 percent lower than they had been a generation earlier. And the real incomes of the really rich – say, those in the top tenth of one percent – were less than half what they had been in the twenties. (The real pretax income of the top 1 percent was about the same in the mid-fifties as it was in 1929, while the pretax income of the top 0.1 percent had fallen about 40 percent. At the same time, income tax rates on the rich had risen sharply.) Meanwhile the real income of the median family had more or less doubled since 1929. And most families didn’t just have higher incomes, they had more security too. Employers offered new benefits, like health insurance and retirement plans.’ (41-42)
- ‘The problem was that most Americans in the twenties couldn’t afford to live that tolerable life. To take the most basic comfort: Most rural Americans still didn’t have indoor plumbing, and many urban Americans had to share facilities with other families. Washing machines existed, but weren’t standard in the home.’ (43)
- ‘By the fifties, although there were still rural Americans who relied on outhouses, and urban families living in tenements with toilets down the hall, they were a distinct minority. By 1955 a majority of American families owned a car. And 70 percent of residences had telephones.’ (43)
- ‘I don’t think it’s romanticizing to say that all this contributed to a new sense of dignity among ordinary Americans.’ (44)
- ‘Postwar American society had its poor, but the truly rich were rare and made little impact on society…And we all lived material lives that were no more different from one another than a Cadillac was from a Chevy: One life might be more luxurious than another, but there were no big differences in where people could go and what they could do.’ (44)
- ‘This sudden decline in the fortunes of the wealthy can be explained in large part with just one word: taxes.’ (46)
- ‘So you might think that the sharp fall in the share of the wealthy in American national income must have reflected a big shift in the distribution of income away from capital and toward labor. But it turns out that this didn’t happen. In 1955 labor received 69 percent of the pretax income earned in the corporate sector, versus 31 percent for capital; this was barely different from the 67-33 split in 1929. But while the division of pretax income between capital and labor barely changed between the twenties and the fifties, the division of after-tax income mainly from capital and those who mainly relied on wages changed radically. In the twenties, taxes had been a minor factor for the rich. The top income tax rate was only 24 percent, and because the inheritance tax on event the largest estates was only 20 percent, wealthy dynasties had little difficulty maintaining themselves. But with the coming of the New Deal, the rich started to face taxes that were not only vastly higher than those of the twenties, but high by today’s standards. The top income tax rate (currently only 35 percent) rose to 63 percent during the first Roosevelt administration, and 79 percent in the second. By the mid-fifties, as the United States
- ‘The average federal tax on corporate profits rose from less than 14 percent in 1929 to more than 45 percent in 1955.’ (48)
- ‘The top estate tax rate [in the Great Compression] rose from 20 percent to 45, then 60, then 70, and finally 77 percent.’ (48)
- ‘But if there’s a single reason blue-collar workers did so much better in the fifties than they had in the twenties, it was the rise of unions.’ (49)
- ‘By 1930 only a bit more than 10 percent on nonagricultural workers were unionized, a number roughly comparable to the unionized share of private-sector workers today. Union membership continued to decline for the first few years of the depression, reaching a low point in 1933. But under the New Deal unions surged in both membership and power. Union membership tripled from 1933 to 1938, then nearly doubled again by 1947. At the end of World War II more than a third of nonfarm workers were members of unions – and many others were paid wages that, explicitly or implicitly, were set either to match union wages or to keep worker happy enough to forestall union organizers.’ (49)
- ‘Roosevelt’s statement on signing the Fair Labor Relations Act in 1935, which established the National Labor Relations Board, couldn’t have been clearer: ‘This act defines, as a part of our substantive law, the right of self-organization of employees in industry for the purpose of collective bargaining, and provides methods by which the government can safeguard that legal right.’ ’ (50)
- ‘Freeman argues that what really happened in the thirties was a two-stage process that was largely independent of government action. First the Great Depression, which led many employers to reduce wages, gave new strength to the union movement as angry workers organized to fight pay cuts. Then the rising strength of the union movement became self-reinforcing, as workers who had already joined unions provided crucial support in the form of financial aid, picketers, and so on to other workers seeking to organize.’ (50)
- ‘Unionization by itself wasn’t enough to bring about the full extent of the compression. The full transformation needed the special circumstances of World War II.’ (51)
- ‘For almost four years in the 1940s important parts of the U.S. economy were more or less directly controlled by the government, as part of the war effort. And the government used its influence to produce a major equalization of income.’ (52)
- ‘Equality and the Postwar Boom’ [section heading] (53)
- ‘For the typical family even good times have never come close to matching the postwar boom. Since 1980 median family income has risen only about 0.7 percent a year [2.7 percent in Great Compression].’ (55)
- ‘As always these are just numbers, providing at best an indication of what really happened in peoples’ lives. But is there any question that the postwar generation was a time when almost everyone in America felt that living standards were rising rapidly, a time in which ordinary working Americans felt that they were achieving a level of prosperity beyond their parents’ wildest dreams?’ (55)
- ‘For now let’s simply accept that during the thirties and forties liberals managed to achieve a remarkable reduction in income inequality, with almost entirely positive effects on the economy as a whole.’ (56)
- ‘To the extent that Truman is remembered today, it’s mostly as a foreign policy leader: the man who oversaw the creation of the Marshall Plan and the strategy of containment, the man who stood up to Stalin in Berlin and in Korea, and set American on the path to eventual victory in the Cold War.’ (57-58)
- ‘In 1948 that Congress was engaged in an attempt to roll back FDR’s New Deal. The de facto leader of the Republicans in Congress was Sen. Robert Taft, and Taft, sometimes referred to as ‘Mr. Republican,’ was deeply opposed to the New Deal, which he regarded as ‘socialistic.’ ’ (58)
- ‘First, the economic catastrophe of 1929-33 shattered the credibility of the old elite and its ideology, and the recovery that began in 1933, incomplete though it was, lent credibility to New Deal reforms…Second, World War II created conditions under which large-scale government intervention in the economy was clearly necessary, sweeping aside skepticism about radical measures.’ (61)
- ‘Of course it wouldn’t have played out that way if the pre-New Deal conventional wisdom had been right – if taxing the rich, providing Social Security and unemployment benefits, and enhancing worker bargaining power had been disastrous for the economy. But the Great Compression was, in fact, followed by the greatest sustained economic boom in U.S.
- ‘In retrospect it’s startling just how clean the New Deal’s record was.’ (62)
- ‘The New Deal’s probity wasn’t an accident. New Deal officials made almost a fetish out of policing their programs against potential corruption. In particular FDR created a powerful ‘division of progress investigation’ to investigate complaints of malfeasance in the WPA. This division proved so effective that a later congressional investigation couldn’t find a single serious irregularity it had overlooked. This dedication to honest government wasn’t a sign of Roosevelt ’s person virtue; rather it reflected a political imperative. FDR’s mission in office was to show that government activism works.’ (62)
- ‘It became very difficult for conservatives to claim that government can’t do anything well after the U.S. government demonstrated its ability not just to fight a global war but also to oversee a vast mobilization of national resources.’ (63)
- ‘Winning the battle of ideas isn’t enough, however, if that victory isn’t supported by an effective political coalition. As it happened, though, the political landscape had changed in a way that shifted the center of political gravity downward, empowering those who gained from the Great Compression and had a stake in maintaining a relatively equal distribution of income.’ (63)
- ‘During the Long Gilded Age one major barrier to an effective political movement on behalf of working Americans was the simple fact that many workers, especially low-wage workers, were denied the vote, either by law or in practice. The biggest groups of disenfranchised workers was the African American population of the South – a group that continued to be denied the vote for a generation after the Great Compression, and is still partly disenfranchised today.’ (63)
- ‘In 1920, 20 percent of American adults were foreign born, and half of them weren’t citizens. So only about 90 percent of adult residents of the United States United States
- ‘As a result, the typical voter has a substantially higher income than the typical person, which is one reason politicians tend to design their policies with the relatively affluent in mind.’ (70)
- ‘One recent statistical analysis estimated that if the share of unionized workers in the labor force had been as high in 2000 as it was in 1964, an additional 10 percent of adults in the lower two-thirds of the income distribution would have voted, compared with only an additional 3 percent of the top third. So the strength of the union movement lowered the economic center of gravity ofU.S.
- ‘In the 1930s the left had ideas about what to do; the right didn’t, except to preach that the economy would heal itself.’ (71-72)
- ‘It was an economy that seemingly provided jobs for everyone. What’s more those abundant jobs came with wages that were higher than ever, and rising every year. At the bottom end, workers were much better off than they would ever be again: The minimum wage in 1966, at $1.25 an hour, was the equivalent of more than $8.00 in today’s dollars.’ (79)
- ‘It’s true that family incomes were a bit less than they are today, because fewer women worked and the gap between women’s and men’s wages was larger. And because incomes were a bit lower than they are now, middle-class families lived in smaller houses, were less likely to have two cars, and in general had a somewhat lower material standard of living than their counterparts today.’ (80)
- ‘Economic security was also unprecedented. By 1966, 80 percent of the population had health insurance, up from only 30 percent at the end of World War II, and by 1970 the fraction of the population with health insurance surpassed today’s 85 percent level. Workers who lost their jobs despite the low unemployment rate were much more likely to receive unemployment insurance than laid-off workers are today, and that insurance covered a larger fraction of their lost wages than does today’s.’ (80)
- ‘Yet the seeds of movement conservatism’s eventual dominance were sown in the 1960s.’ (81)
- ‘What really happened in the sixties was that Republicans learned how to exploit emerging cultural resentments and fears to win elections. Above all, Republicans learned how to exploit white backlash against the civil rights movement and its consequences. That discovery would eventually make it possible for movement conservatives to win the White House and take control of Congress.’ (82)
- ‘Forty years on the freedom riders are regarded as heroes and Martin Luther King has become a national icon, a symbol of the better angels of America’s nature. In the sixties, however, many white Americans found the push for civil rights deeply disturbing and threatening.’ (84)
- ‘Ronald Reagan, who had opposed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Act – calling the latter ‘humiliating to the South’ – ran for governor of California in part on a promise to repeal the state’s fair housing act. ‘If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting this house,’ Reagan said, ‘he has a right to do so.’ ’ (86)
- ‘Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the program most people meant when they said ‘welfare,’ never was a major cost of government, and that cheating was never a significant problem.’ (92)
- ‘Reagan didn’t need to point out that a substantial fraction of those who entered the welfare rolls were black.’ (93)
- ‘The sixties have taken on a nostalgic glow. But at the time the reaction of most Americans to the emergence of the counterculture was horror and anger, not admiration.’ (94)
- ‘Why did the counterculture arise? Again nobody really knows, but there were some obvious factors. That magic economy was surely part of the story: Because making a living seemed easy, the cost of experimenting with an alternative lifestyle seemed low – you could always go back and get a regular job. In fact, you have to wonder whether the Nixon recession of 1969-71 – which saw the unemployment rate rise from 3.5 to 6 percent – didn’t do more to end the hippie movement than the killings at Altamont .’ (94)
- ‘The Pill made sexual experimentation easier than in any previous historical era. And the youth of the sixties may have had different values in part because they were the first generation to have grown up watching TV, exposed to a barrage of images (and advertisements) that, though designed to sell products, also had the effect of undermining traditional values.’ (95)
- ‘Lyndon Johnson didn’t want a war. His 1967 State of the Union address is remarkable for its mournful tone, its lack of bombast.’ (96)
- ‘Nonetheless Johnson and the nation got sucked into war.’ (97)
- ‘For Vietnam to have been decisive, either the anti-war movement or the backlash against that movement – or both – would have had to grow into a sustained force in American politics, continuing to shape policies and elections even after the war was over. In fact none of this happened. The antiwar movement, which loomed so large in the sixties and early seventies, faded away with remarkable speed once the draft ended in 1973 and most U.S. forces were withdrawn from Vietnam.’ (97)
- ‘On the other side Nixon was never able to convert the backlash against the antiwar movement into major congressional victories. There’s a persistent myth that Vietnam
- ‘The sixties were the time of hippies and student radicals, of hardhats beating up longhairs, or war and protest. It would be foolish to say that none of this mattered. Yet all these things played at best a minor direct role in laying the foundations for the changes that would take place in American political economy over the next thirty years.’ (99)
- ‘After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Johnson told Bill Moyers, then a presidential aide, ‘I think we’ve just delivered the South to the Republican Party for the rest of my life, and yours.’ ’ (99)
- ‘William F. Buckley blazed the trail. His 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, which condemned the university for harboring faculty hostile to or at least skeptical of Christianity, not to mention teaching Keynesian economics, made him a national figure. In 1955 he founded the National Review. It’s worth looking at early issues of the National Review, to get a sense of what movement conservatives sounded like before they learned to speak in code. Today leading figures on the American rights are masters of what the British call ‘dog-whistle politics’: They say things that appeal to certain groups in a way that only the targeted groups can hear – and thereby avoid having the extremism of their positions become generally obvious.’ (102)
- ‘ ‘General Franco is an authentic national hero. It is generally conceded that he above others had the combination of talents, the perseverance, and the sense of the righteousness of his cause, that were required to wrest Spain from the ands of the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists that were imposing on her, in the thirties, a regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul, to deny, even, Spain’s historical identity.’ [Buckley] The ‘regime so grotesque’ overthrown by Generalissimo Francisco Franco – with crucial aid from Mussolini and Hitler – was in fact Spain
- ‘In 1964 a coalition of conservative activists seized control of the Republican National Convention and nominated Barry Goldwater for president. It was, however, a false dawn for the right. The fledgling conservative movement was able to nominate Goldwater only because the Republican establishment was caught by surprise, and the movement still had no way to win national elections: Goldwater went down to humiliating defeat. To achieve its goals movement conservatism needed a broader base. And Ronald Reagan, more than anyone else, showed the way.’ (104)
- ‘[Reagan’s] statistics were misleading at best, and the anecdotes suspect. ‘Federal employees number 2.5 million, and federal, state, and local, one out of six of the nation’s work force is employed by the government’ declared Reagan, conveying the impression of a vast, useless bureaucracy. It would have spoiled his point if people had known what those useless bureaucrats were actually doing. In 1964 almost two-thirds of the federal employees worked either in the Defense Department or in the postal service, while most state and local employees were schoolteachers, policemen, or firemen.’ (105)
- ‘Reagan had found a way to espouse more or less the same policies but in language that played to the perception – and prejudices – of the common man.’ (106)
- ‘In reality there was no sane alternative to a restrained approach. Like modern terrorism, communism in the fifties and sixties was a threat that could be contained but not eliminated. Moreover, in the end, the strategy of containment – of refraining from any direct attempt to overthrow Communist regimes by force, fighting only defensive wars, and combating Soviet influence with aid and diplomacy – was completely successful: World War III never happened, and the United States won the Cold War decisively.’ (107)
- ‘Movement conservatism, then, found a mass popular base by finding ways to appeal to two grassroots sentiments: white backlash and paranoia about communism.’ (110)
- ‘Today we take it for granted that most of the business community is solidly behind the hard right. The drug industry wants its monopoly power left undisturbed; the insurance industry wants to fend off national health care; the power companies want freedom from environmental regulations; and everyone wants tax breaks. In the fifties and sixties, however, with memories of the New Deal’s triumphs still fresh, large corporations were politically cautious. The initial business base of movement conservatism was mainly among smaller, often privately owned businesses. And the focus of their ire was, above all, unions.’ (110-111)
- ‘All Western democracies emerged from the stresses of the Great Depression and World War II with some kind of welfare state.’ (112)
- ‘By the 1960s most Americans did have health insurance.’ (112)
- ‘Compensation that takes the form of benefits has the advantage of not being subject to income tax, so that a dollar given to an employee in the form of health benefits is worth more to the recipient than a dollar paid in straight salary.’ (112)
- ‘From the 1960s on, business owners who hated unions were a solid source of financial support. And this support was rewarded…in the seventies and eighties America’s political shift to the right empowered businesses to confront and, to a large extent, crush the union movement, with huge consequences for both wage inequality and the political balance of power.’ (114-115)
- ‘By the 1970s the intelligentsia of movement conservatism had an establishment of its own, with financial backing on a scale beyond the wildest dreams of its liberal opponents.’ (117)
- ‘The story, in brief, is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s members of the new conservative intelligentsia persuaded both wealthy individuals and some corporate leaders to funnel cash into a conservative intellectual infrastructure. To a large extent this infrastructure consists of think tanks that are set up to resemble academic institutions, but only publish studies that play into a preconceived point of view. The American Enterprise Institute, although it was founded in 1943, expanded dramatically beginning in 1971, when it began receiving substantial amounts of corporate money and grants from conservative family foundations. The Heritage Foundation was created in 1973 with cash from Joseph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife. The libertarian Cato Institute relied heavily on funds from the Koch family foundations. Media organizations are also part of the infrastructure. The same set of foundations that have funded conservative think tanks also gave substantial support to The Public Interest, as well as publications like The American Spectator, which obsessively pursued alleged scandals during the Clinton
- ‘Supply-side doctrine, which claimed without evidence that tax cuts would pay for themselves, never got any traction in the world of professional economic research, even among conservatives. N. Gregory Mankiw, the Harvard economist who was the chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers between 2003 and 2005, famously described the supply-siders as ‘cranks and charlatans’ in the first edition of his textbook on the principles of economics. (The phrase vanished from later editions.)’ (119-120)
- ‘The dire mood of the 1970s made it possible for movement conservatives to claim that liberal policies had been discredited. And the newly empowered movement soon achieved a remarkable reversal of the New Deal’s achievements.’ (123)
- ‘The dire mood of the 1970s made it possible for movement conservatives to claim that liberal policies had been discredited. And the newly empowered movement soon achieved a remarkable reversal of the New Deal’s achievements.’ (123)
- ‘America
- ‘It’s true that there have been periods of optimism – Reagan’s ‘Morning in America,’ as the economy recovered from the severe slump of the early eighties, the feverish get-rich-quick era of the late nineties. Since the end of the postwar boom, however, economic progress has always felt tentative and temporary.’ (125)
- ‘Median household income, adjusted for inflation, grew modestly from 1973 to 2005, the most recent year for which we have data: The total gain was about 16 percent. Even this modest gain may, however, overstate how well American families were doing, because it was achieved in part through longer working hours. In 1973 many wives still didn’t work outside the home, and many who did worked only part-time.’ (126-127)
- ‘According to the available data, [life] has gotten harder: The median inflation-adjusted earnings of men working full-time in 2005 were slightly lower than they had been in 1973. And even that statistic is deceptively favorable. Thanks to the maturing of the baby boomers today’s work force is older and more experienced than the work force of 1973 – and more experienced workers should, other things being equal, command higher wages. If we look at the earnings of men aged thirty-five to forty-four – men who would, a generation ago, often have been supporting stay-at-home wives – we find that inflation- adjusted wages were 12 percent higher in 1973 than they are now.’ (127)
- ‘The point is that the typical American family hasn’t made clear progress in the last thirtysomething years. And that’s not normal.’ (128)
- ‘If gains in productivity had been evenly shared across the workforce, the typical worker’s income would be about 35 percent higher now than it was in the early seventies. But the upward redistribution of income meant that the typical worker saw a far smaller gain. Indeed, everyone below roughly the 90th percentile of the wage distribution – the bottom of the top 10 percent – saw his or her income grow more slowly than average, while only those above the 90th percentile saw above-average gains.’ (128-129)
- ‘Once you get way up the scale, however, the gains have been spectacular – the top tenth of a percent saw its income rise fivefold, and the top .01 percent of Americans is seven times richer than they were in 1973.’ (129)
- ‘Once you get way up the scale, however, the gains have been spectacular – the top tenth of a percent saw its income rise fivefold, and the top .01 percent of Americans is seven times richer than they were in 1973.’ (129)
- ‘Even the most pessimistic mainstream estimates, by George Borjas and Larry Katz of Harvard, suggest that immigration has reduced the wages of high-school dropouts by about 5 percent, with a much smaller effect on workers with a high school degree, and a small positive effect on highly educated workers.’ (134)
- ‘There’s no question that U.S. trade with Bangladesh and other Third World countries, including China, widens inequality…U.S. trade with Third World countries reduces job opportunities for less-skilled American workers, while increasing demand for more-skilled workers.’ (135)
- ‘The observation that even highly educated Americans have, for the most part, seen their incomes fall behind the average, while a handful of people have done incredibly well, undercuts the case for skill-biased technical change as an explanation of inequality.’ (136)
- ‘An institutions-and-norms story helps explain American exceptionalism: No other advanced country has seen the same kind of surge in inequality that has taken place here.’ (137)
- ‘The economy of the fifties and sixties was characterized by ‘pattern wages,’ in which wage settlements of major unions and corporations established norms for the economy as a whole. At the same time the existence of powerful unions acted as a restraint on the incomes of both management and stockholders. Top executives knew that if they paid themselves huge salaries, they would be inviting trouble with their workers; similarly corporations that made high profits while failing to raise wages were putting labor relations at risk.’ (138)
- ‘To see how different labor relations were under the Treaty of Detroit from their state today, compare two iconic corporations, one of the past, one of the present. In the final years of the postwar boom General Motors was America America America
- ‘But [in the 1970s] it was only a bit more than CEOs were paid in the 1930s, and ‘only’ 40 times what the average full-time worker in the U.S. economy as a whole was paid at the time. By the early years of this decade, however, CEO pay averaged more than $9 million a year, 367 times the pay of the average worker. Other top executives also saw huge increases in pay, though not as large as that of CEOs: The next two highest officers in major companies made 31 times the average worker’s salary in the seventies, but 169 times as much by the early 2000s.’ (142)
- ‘Even corporate boards that aren’t smitten with the notion of superstar leadership end up paying high salaries, partly to attract executives whom they consider adequate, partly because the financial markets will be suspicious of a company whose CEO isn’t lavishly paid.’ (144)
- ‘The doctrine that greed is good did its work, by helping to change social and political norms. Paychecks that would have made front-page news and created a furor a generation ago hardly rate mention today. Not surprisingly, executive pay in European countries – which haven’t experienced the same change in norms and institutions – has lagged far behind. The CEO of BP, based in the United Kingdom, is paid less than half as much as the CEO of Chevron, a company half BP’s size, but based in America.’ (148)
- ‘Why, then, isn’t Wal-Mart unionized? Why, in general, did the union movement lose ground in manufacturing while failing to gain members in the rising service industries? The answer is simple and brutal: Business interests, which seemed to have reached an accommodation with the labor movement in the 1960s, went on the offensive against unions beginning in the 1970s. And we’re not talking about gentle persuasion, we’re talking about hardball tactics, often including the illegal firing of workers who tried to organize or support union activity. During the late seventies and early eighties at least one in every twenty workers who voted for a union was illegally fired; some estimates put the number as high as one in eight.’ (150)
- ‘Policy, not personalities, is the reason politics has become so bitter and partisan. The great age of bipartisanship wasn’t a reflection of the gentlemanly character of an earlier generation of politicians. Rather, it reflected the subdued nature of political conflict in an era when the parties weren’t that far apart on basic issues.’ (154-155)
- ‘Policy, not personalities, is the reason politics has become so bitter and partisan. The great age of bipartisanship wasn’t a reflection of the gentlemanly character of an earlier generation of politicians. Rather, it reflected the subdued nature of political conflict in an era when the parties weren’t that far apart on basic issues.’ (154-155)
- ‘That era ended, and bitter partisanship reemerged, when the Republicans changed their minds a second time.’ (155)
- ‘By 2004, however, 76 percent of Americans saw significant differences between the parties, up from 46 percent in 1972.’ (159)
- ‘Modern movement conservatives sometimes say, contemptuously, that Nixon governed as a liberal. And in terms of economic and environmental policy, it’s true, at least by today’s standards. In addition to proposing universal health care, Nixon pushed for a guaranteed minimum income.’ (159)
- ‘The 2001 Bush tax cuts included a phaseout of the estate tax, with rates going down and exemptions going up, concluding with total elimination of the tax in 2010. In other words today’s Republican party is willing to go further than the Republican Party [sic] of the 1920s, the last, golden years of the Long Gilded Age, in cutting taxes on the wealthy.’ (162)
- ‘There hasn’t been any corresponding radicalization of the Democratic Party, so the right-wing takeover of the GOP is the underlying cause of today’s bitter partisanship.’ (163)
- ‘The nature of the hold movement conservatism has on the Republican Party may be summed up very simply: Yes, Virginia
- ‘There’s nothing on the left comparable to the right-wing think tank universe.’ (164)
- ‘There’s nothing on the left comparable to the right-wing think tank universe.’ (164)
- ‘Equally important, however, the takeover of the lobbies helped enforce loyalty within the Republican Party, by providing a huge pool of patronage jobs – very, very well-paid patronage jobs – that could be used to reward those who toe the party line.’ (167)
- ‘The public strongly believes that Medicare should use its bargaining power to extract lower drug prices – but Rep. Billy Tauzin, a Democrat-turned-Republican who was the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee from 2001 to 2004, pushed through a Medicare bill that specifically prohibited negotiations over prices, then moved on to a reported seven-figure salary as head of the pharmaceutical industry’s main lobbying group.’ (167)
- ‘The few remaining Republican moderates in Congress were, with rare exceptions, first elected pre-Reagan or, at the latest, before the 1994 election that sealed the dominance of the Gingrich wing of the party.’ (168)
- ‘The institutions of movement conservatism ensure a continuity of goals that has no counterpart on the other side.’ (168)
- ‘The hypothesis that the rising concentration of income empowered the economic elite, driving the rightward shift of the GOP, runs up against a problem of timing. The sharp rightward shift of the Republican Party began before there was any visible increase in income inequality.’ (170)
- ‘Voters don’t vote solely in their own self-interest – in fact a completely self-interested citizen wouldn’t bother voting at all, since the cost of going to the polling place outweighs the likely effect of any individual’s vote on his or her own well-being.’ (172)
- ‘The benefits guaranteed by Medicare are the same for everyone, but most of the taxes that support the program – which are more or less proportional to income – are paid by no more than 25 percent of the population.’ (174)
- ‘The redistributive aspect of Medicare is characteristic of the welfare state of the whole. Means-tested programs like Medicaid and food stamps obviously redistribute income, but so do middle-class entitlements. Americans in the bottom 60 percent of earners can expect to receive significantly more in Social Security benefits than they paid in FICA taxes, while those in the top 20 percent can expect to receive less than they paid.’ (174)
- ‘[Reagan] began his 1980 campaign with a speech on states’ rights at the county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. Everyone got the message. Considering how much has been written about the changes in American politics over the past generation, how much agonizing there has been about the sources of Democratic decline and Republican ascendancy, it’s amazing how much of the whole phenomenon can be summed up in just five words: Southern whites started voting Republican.’ (178)
- ‘The overwhelming importance of the Southern switch suggests an almost embarrassingly simple story about the political success of movement conservatism. It goes like this: Thanks to their organization, the interlocking institutions that constitute the reality of the vast right-wing conspiracy, movement conservatives were able to take over the Republican Party, and move its policies sharply to the right. In most of the country this rightward shift alienated voters, who gradually moved toward the Democrats. But Republicans were nonetheless able to win presidential elections, and eventually gain control of Congress, because they were able to exploit the race issue to win political dominance of the South. End of story.’ (182)
- ‘Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.’ Karl Rove (183)
- ‘The perception that Democrats are weak on national security – a perception that made the partisan exploitation of 9/11 possible – didn’t really settle in until the 1980s.’ (184)
- ‘When memories of the Vietnam War in all its horror and futility were still fresh…’ (185)
- ‘If there was a moment when these theories [that civilians lost the Vietnam War] went mainstream, it was with the success of the 1983 film First Blood.’ (185)
- ‘When Reagan described the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire,’ liberals and moderates tended to scoff – not because they were weak on national security, but because they were pragmatic about what it took to achieve national security. But many Americans loved it.’ (185)
- ‘In 1976 a plurality of military leaders identified themselves as independents, while a third identified themselves as Republicans. By 1996 two-thirds considered themselves Republicans.’ (186)
- ‘It’s hard to make the case, however, that the perceived Republican advantage on national security played a crucial role in any national election before 9/11.’ (187)
- ‘The national security issue seems to have given movement conservatism two election victories, in 2002 and 2004, that it wouldn’t have been able to win otherwise, extending Republican control of both Congress and the White House four years beyond their natural life span. I don’t mean to minimize the consequences of that extension, which will be felt for decades to come, especially on the Supreme Court. But defense does not, at this point, look like an enduring source of conservative advantage.’ (189)
- ‘ ‘We believe that the practice of sodomy tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God, recognized by our country’s founders, and shared by the majority of Texans.’ So declares the 2006 platform of the Texas Republican Party, which also pledges to ‘dispel the myth of the separation of church and state.’ ’ (190)
- ‘It’s surprising how long it has taken for political analysts to realize just how strong the Christian right’s influence really is.’ (190)
- ‘It’s surprising how long it has taken for political analysts to realize just how strong the Christian right’s influence really is.’ (190)
- ‘At the Food and Drug Administration, Bush appointed W. David Hager, the coauthor of As Jesus Cared for Women – a book that recommends particular scriptural readings as a treatment for PMS – to the Reproductive Health Advisory Committee; Hager played a key role in delaying approval for the ‘morning-after’ pill. Bush’s 2006 choice to head family-planning services at the Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. Eric Keroack, worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling center that regards the distribution of contraceptives as ‘demeaning to women.’ ’ (191)
- ‘Mobilized evangelical voters can swing close elections. Without the role of the churches, Ohio
- ‘The typical voter is considerably better off than the typical family, partly because poorer citizens are less likely than the well-off to vote, partly because many lower-income residents of the United States aren’t citizens. This means that economic policies that benefit an affluent minority but hurt a majority aren’t necessarily political losers from an electoral point of view.’ (192-193)
- ‘The resurgence of immigration since the 1960s – dominated by inflows of low-skilled, low-wage workers, especially from Mexico – has largely re-created [sic] Gilded Age levels of disenfranchisement.’ (194)
- ‘There’s no question that vote suppression – the use of any means available to prevent likely Democratic voters, usually African Americans, from casting legitimate ballots – has been a consistent Republican tactic since the party was taken over by movement conservatives. In 2000 Florida’s Republican Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, conducted what the New York Timescalled a ‘massive purge of eligible voters,’ disproportionately black, who were misidentified as felons. Without that purge George W. Bush would not have made it to the White House.’ (195)
- ‘Why have politicians who advocate policies that hurt most people been able to win elections?’ (197)
- ‘Why have politicians who advocate policies that hurt most people been able to win elections?’ (197)
- ‘Nancy Pelosi, the new Speaker of the House, made headlines by becoming the first woman to hold the position – but she is also the most progressive Speaker ever.’ (199)
- ‘In this chapter, however, I’ll make the case for believing that the 2006 election wasn’t an aberration, that the U.S. public is actually ready for something different – a new politics of equality. But the emergence of this new politics isn’t a foregone conclusion. It will happen only if liberal politicians seize the opportunity.’ (199-200)
- ‘The current disconnect between overall economic growth and the fortunes of typical Americans is, as far as I can tell, unprecedented in modern U.S.
- ‘Clinton Clinton
- ‘The now infamous ‘Mission Accomplished’ photo op, with Bush’s staged landing on an aircraft carrier, was, to a large extent, what the war was all about. And the war worked to Bush’s advantage for a surprisingly long time. In spite of the failure to find WMD and the rising U.S. death toll, it took more than two years into the war before a majority of Americans began consistently telling pollsters that invading Iraq was a mistake.’ (204-205)
- ‘Ideally the public will conclude from the debacle that if you want to win a war, don’t hire a movement conservative. Hire a liberal, or at least an Eisenhower-type Republican.’ (205)
- ‘To have run the Iraq War with efficiency and honesty, the way FDR ran World War II, would have meant behaving at least a little bit like the New Deal – and that would have been anathema to the people in charge.’ (206)
- ‘Voters will remember where that got us under Bush – that the tough-talking, pose-striking leader misled the nation into an unnecessary and disastrous war.’ (206)
- ‘There is, however, a good reason to believe that the race issue is gradually losing its force.’ (206)
- ‘America America
- ‘The political success of movement conservatism depends on appealing to whites who resent blacks. But it’s difficult to be antiblack without also being anti-immigrant [sic]. And because the rapidly growing number of immigrants makes them an increasingly potent political force, the race issue, which has been a powerful asset for movement conservatives in the past, may gradually be turning into a liability.’ (209)
- ‘As a nation we’ve become much less racist. The most dramatic evidence of diminishing racism is the way people respond to questions about a subject that once struck terror into white hearts: miscegenation. In 1978, as the ascent of movement conservatism to power was just beginning, only 36 percent of Americans polled by Gallup
- ‘What made the New deal’s influence so enduring was the fact that FDR provided answers to inequality and economic insecurity.’ (213)
- ‘The moral case for universal health care isn’t in dispute. Instead the opposition to universal health care depends on the claim that doing the morally right thing isn’t possible, or at least that the cost – in taxpayer dollars, in reduced quality of care for those doing okay under our current system – would be too high. This is where the facts and figures come in. The fact is that every other advanced country manages to achieve the supposedly impossible, providing health care to all its citizens. The quality of care they provide, by any available measure, is as good as or better than ours. And they do all of this while spending much less per person on health care than we do. Health care, in other words, turns out to be an area in which doing the right thing is also a free lunch in economic terms.’ (215-216)
- ‘Health care reform is the natural centerpiece of a new New Deal. If liberals want to show that progressive policies can create a better, more just society, this is the place to start.’ (216)
- ‘Overall 20 percent of the population will account for 80 percent of medical costs. The sickest 1 percent of the population will, on average, need more than $150,000 worth of medical care next year alone.’ (216)
- ‘Opponents of government health insurance sometimes call it ‘socialized medicine,’ but that’s misleading – it’s socialized insurance, which isn’t at all the same thing. In Canada Britain
- ‘The United States spends almost twice as much on health care per person as Canada, France, and Germany, almost two and a half times as much as Britain – yet our life expectancy is at the bottom of the pack. These numbers are so stark, and such a refutation of the conventional wisdom that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector, that some politicians, pundits, and economists simply deny them.’ (217-218)
- ‘Attempts to crunch the numbers, however, suggest that different lifestyles, and the diseases to which they make us prone, aren’t enough to explain more than a small fraction of the cost gap between the United States and everyone else. A study by McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the difference in disease mix between the United States and other advanced countries accounts for less than $25 billion in annual treatment costs, or less than $100 of the roughly $3,000 per person extra the United States spends on health care each year.’ (219)
- ‘Although American spends much more on health care than anyone else, this doesn’t seem to buy significantly more care. By measures such as the number of doctors per 100,000 people, the average number of doctors’ visits, the number of days spent in the hospital, the quantity of prescription drugs we consume, and so on. American health care does not stand out from health care in other rich countries. We’re off the charts in terms of what we pay for care, but only in the middle of the pack in terms of what we actually get for our money.’ (219)
- ‘Medicare spends only about 2 percent of its funds on administration; for private insurers the figure is about 15 percent. McKinsey Global estimates that in 2003 the extra administrative costs of the U.S. U.S.
- ‘Unlike other advanced countries, the United States
- ‘U.S.
- ‘There’s one more terrible defect I should mention in the U.S.
- ‘Nonetheless about 85 percent of Americans do have health insurance, and most of them receive decent care. Why does the system work even that well? Part of that answer is that even inAmerica America
- ‘Nonetheless about 85 percent of Americans do have health insurance, and most of them receive decent care. Why does the system work even that well? Part of that answer is that even in
- ‘As recently as 2001, 65 percent of American workers had employment-based coverage. By 2006 that was down to 59 percent, with no sign that the downward trend was coming to an end. What’s driving the decline in employment-based coverage is, in turn, the rising cost of insurance: The average annual premium for family coverage was more than eleven thousand dollars in 2006, more than a quarter of the median worker’s annual earnings. For lower-paid workers that’s just too much – in fact, it’s close to the total annual earnings of a full-time worker paid the minimum wage.’ (225)
- ‘Why is insurance getting more expensive? The answer, perversely, is medical progress. Advances in medical technology mean that doctors can treat many previously untreatable problems, but only at great expense. Insurance companies pay for these treatments but compensate by raising premiums.’ (225)
- ‘There were a few months in 1993 when fundamental health care reform seemed unstoppable. But it failed – and the failure of the Clinton Clinton Clinton
- ‘It’s equally certain that the insurance industry will fiercely oppose reform, as it did in 1993.’ (229)
- ‘The fact is that no health care reform can succeed unless it reduces the excess administrative costs now imposed by the insurance industry – and that means forcing the industry to shrink, even if the insurers retain a role in the system. There’s really no way to buy their cooperation.’ (229)
- ‘The drug industry will also be a source of fierce opposition – and probably more so than in 1993, because drug spending is a much larger share of total medical costs today than it was fifteen years ago.’ (229)
- ‘[Clinton Clinton July 30, 1965 , less than nine months after his victory in the 1964 election. Clinton September 23, 1993 .’ (233)
- ‘Above all, however, Clinton Clinton
- ‘Today’s health care reformers have to avoid these mistakes. They need to hit the ground running: If and when a progressive president and a progressive congressional majority take office, they must have at least the key elements of a universal health care plan already decided and widely discussed. Thus it’s a very good thing that health care reform has become a central issue in the current presidential campaign. They’ll also need to offer a plan that reassures Americans that they will retain some choice, that those who currently have good insurance won’t be forced into something worse.’ (234)
- ‘Nobody could be sure how well the New Deal’s plans to protect Americans from risk would work in practice. By contrast, universal health care has existed for decades in most of the Western world, and we already have a very good idea of what works.’ (235)
- ‘Medicine may be hard, but health insurance is simple. The rest of the world’s industrialized nations have already figured it out, and done so without leaving 45 million of their countrymen uninsured and 16 million or so undernourished, and without letting costs spiral into the stratosphere and severely threaten their national economies. Even better, these successes are not secret, and the mechanisms not unknown. Ask health researchers what should be done, and they will sigh and suggest something akin to what France Germany
- ‘Consider the French system, which the World Health Organization ranked number one in the world. France
- ‘The parallels between the French system and Medicare aren’t perfect: There are some features of the French system that don’t have counterparts in America France
- ‘Americas
- ‘Extending Medicare or its equivalent to every American would require a lot of additional revenue, probably about 4 percent of GDP. True, these additional taxes wouldn’t represent a true financial burden on the country, since they would replace insurance premiums people already pay. Despite that fact, it would be very challenging to convince people that a large tax increase didn’t represent a true net increase in their financial burden, especially in the face of the dishonest opposition campaign such a proposal would inevitably encounter. It would also be difficult to pass tax increases of the size needed, even with a strong progressive majority.’ (237-238)
- ‘Now for the good news: Over the past few years policy analysts and politicians have been evolving an approach to health care reform that seems to be a workable compromise between economic efficiency and political realism. It involves four basic elements: Community rating; Subsidies for low-income families; Mandated coverage; Public-private competition.’ (238)
- ‘There are, nonetheless, political advantages to a community-rating-subsidies-and-mandates system. First and foremost, it requires much less additional revenue than single-payer, because most of the cost of insurance continues to be paid in the form of premiums from employers and individuals. All you need is enough revenue to subsidize low-income families. Reasonable estimates suggest that the revenue needed to institute a hybrid universal care system is considerably less than the revenue lost due to the Bush tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire at the end of 2010.’ (240)
- ‘Allowing a buy-in to Medicare creates competition between public and private plans. The evidence suggests that the government plans, which would have lower overheard costs because they wouldn’t devote large sums to marketing, would win that competition.’ (241)
- ‘Getting universal care should be the key domestic priority for modern liberals. Once they succeed there, they can turn to the broader, more difficult task of reining in American inequality.’ (243)
- ‘The America
- ‘Ever since America
- ‘Today’s rich had formed their own virtual country….[T]hey had build a self-contained world unto themselves, complete with their own health-care system (concierge doctors), travel networks (Net Jets, destination clubs), separate economy….The rich weren’t just getting richer; they were becoming financial foreigners, creating their own country within a country, their own society within a society, and their economy within an economy.’ Richistan (246)
- ‘Americans still tend to say, when asked, that individuals can make their own place in society. According to one survey 61 percent of Americans agree with the statement that ‘people get rewarded for their effort,’ compared with 49 percent in Canada France America
- ‘Students who scored in the bottom fourth on the [eighth grade] exam, but came from families whose status put them in the top fourth – what we used to call RDKs, for ‘rich dumb kids,’ when I was a teenager – were more likely to finish college than students who scored in the top fourth but whose parents were in the bottom fourth.’ (248)
- ‘It would be closer to the truth, though not the whole truth, to say that in modern America
- ‘Mobility is highest in the Scandinavian countries, and most results suggest that mobility is lower in the United States France Canada Britain
- ‘Through a quirk in the way the tax laws have been interpreted, these managers – some of whom make more than a billion dollars a year – get to have most of their earnings taxed at the capital gains rate, which is only 15 percent, even as other high earners pay a 35 percent rate. The hedge fund tax loophole costs the government more than $6 billion in lost revenue, roughly the cost of providing health care to three million children. Almost $2 billion of the total goes to just twenty-five individuals. Even conservative economists believe that the tax break is unjustified, and should be eliminated.’ (250)
- ‘The hedge fund loophole is a classic example of how the concentration of income in a few hands corrupts politics.’ (250)
- ‘The hedge fund loophole is a classic example of how the concentration of income in a few hands corrupts politics.’ (250)
- ‘Most people get most of their income by selling their labor to employers.’ (251)
- ‘On the other hand, if things are going well for you, being French has its drawbacks. Income tax rates are somewhat higher than they are in the United States, and payroll taxes, especially the amount formally paid by employers but in effect taken out of wages, are much higher.’ (253)
- ‘The United States spends less than three percent of GDP on programs that reduce inequality among those under 65. To match whatCanada Europe does would require an extra 4 percent of GDP; to match the Scandinavian countries, an additional 9 percent. U.S. Canada Britain Sweden
- ‘On the other hand, if things are going well for you, being French has its drawbacks. Income tax rates are somewhat higher than they are in the United States, and payroll taxes, especially the amount formally paid by employers but in effect taken out of wages, are much higher.’ (253)
- ‘The United States spends less than three percent of GDP on programs that reduce inequality among those under 65. To match what
- ‘[Other countries’] problems are not, however, as simple or as closely related to the generosity of social programs as you might think. France United States United States U.S. France United States
- ‘It’s deeply misleading to use the French example to argue against doing more to help the poor and unlucky.’ (256)
- ‘Raising taxes on the rich back toward historical levels can pay for part, though only part, of a stronger safety net that limits inequality. The first step toward restoring progressivity to the tax system is to let the Bush tax cuts for the very well off expire at the end of 2010, as they are now scheduled to. That alone would raise a significant amount of revenue. The nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Joint Tax Policy Center
- ‘
Top Tax on Earned Income | Top Tax on Long-Term Capital Gains | Top Tax on Corporate Profits | |
1979 | 70 | 28 | 48 |
2006 | 35 | 15 | 35 |
(257)
- ‘One recent study estimates that tax avoidance by multinationals costs about $50 billion a year.’ (258)
- ‘If universal health care can be achieved, and the New Deal idea that government can be a force for good is reinvigorated, things that now seem off the table might not look so far out.’ (258)
- ‘From the New Deal until the 1970s it was considered normal and appropriate to have ‘super’ tax rates on very-high-income individuals. Only a few people were subject to the 70 percent top bracket in the 70s, let alone the 90 percent-plus top rates of the Eisenhower years.’ (259)
- ‘Realistically, however, this would not be enough to pay for social expenditures comparable to those in other advanced countries, not even the relatively modest Canadian level. In addition to imposing higher taxes on the rich, other advanced countries also impose higher taxes on the middle class, through both higher social insurance payments and value-added taxes – in effect, national sales taxes.’ (260)
- ‘Persuading the public that middle-income families would be better off paying somewhat higher taxes in return for a stronger social safety net will be a hard sell after decades of antitax, antigovernment propaganda.’ (260)
- ‘Health care reform, which is tremendously important in itself, would have further benefits: It would blaze a trail for a wider progressive agenda. This is also the reason movement conservatives are fiercely determined not to let health care reform succeed.’ (260)
- ‘Health care reform, which is tremendously important in itself, would have further benefits: It would blaze a trail for a wider progressive agenda. This is also the reason movement conservatives are fiercely determined not to let health care reform succeed.’ (260)
- ‘There are two common but somewhat contradictory objections heard to increasing the minimum wage. On one hand, it’s argued that raising the minimum wage will reduce employment and increase unemployment. On the other hand it’s argued that raising the minimum will have little or no effect in raising wages. The evidence, however, suggests that a minimum wage increase will in fact have modest positive effects. On the employment side, a classic study by David Card of Berkeley Princeton , two of America United States Washington Idaho Washington Idaho Washington Washington
- ‘The minimum wage, however, matters mainly to low-paid workers. Any broader effort to reduce market inequality will have to do something about incomes further up the scale. The most important tool in that respect is likely to be an end to the thirty-year tilt of government policy against unions.’ (262)
- ‘A new political climate could revitalize the union movement – and revitalizing unions should be a key progressive goal. Specific legislation, such as the Employee Free Choice Act, which would reduce the ability of employers to intimidate workers into rejecting a union, is only part of what’s needed. It’s also crucial to enforce labor laws already on the books. Much if not most of the antiunion activity that led to the sharp decline in American unionization was illegal even under existing law. But employers judged, correctly, that they could get away with it.’ (263)
- ‘Historical experience still suggests that a new progressive majority should not be shy about questioning private-sector pay when it seems outrageous. Moral suasion was effective in the past, and could be so again.’ (264)
- ‘It is possible, both as an economic matter and in terms of practical politics, to reduce inequality and make America
- ‘One of the seeming paradoxes of America in the early twenty-first century is that those of us who call ourselves liberal are, in an important sense, conservative, while those who call themselves conservative are for the most part deeply radical. Liberals want to restore the middle-class society I grew up in; those who call themselves conservative want to take us back to the Gilded Age, undoing a century of history. Liberals defend long-standing institutions like Social Security and Medicare; those who call themselves conservative want to privatize or undermine those institutions. Liberals want to honor our democratic principles and the rule of law; those who call themselves conservative want the president to have dictatorial powers and have applauded the Bush administration as it imprisons people without charges and subjects them to torture.’ (265)
- ‘When liberals and conservatives clash over voter rights in America
- ‘I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in a democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it.’ (267)
- ‘In the long run we can hope for a return to that kind of politics: two reasonable parties that accept all that is best in our country but compete over their ability to deliver a decent life to all Americans, and keep each other honest. For now, being an active liberal means being a progressive, and being a progressive means being partisan.’ (272-273)
- ‘In the end, democracy is what being a liberal is all about.’ (273)
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