All Things in Moderation

Here I shall insert an inbred cat:

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I’ll throw this up to start the day since I happen to be up and about.

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Tax the rich.

Yet most people I know don’t want to trade their slick smartphones for “Matrix”-era Motorolas. The people I know are happier now than they were in the ’90s. They do not see a 15.1 percent poverty rate as a cause for panic. Their wages are not lower than they were 14 years ago. Today’s high poverty rate is not, as far as I can tell, a mainstream concern. This is one of the reasons the American economy is in such trouble.  

The Great Recession found most of its victims among the least educated Americans. The unemployment rate for Americans who lack both high school and college degrees is 23.9 percent. But these are not the people you will typically hear from in the mainstream media; they’re not a major force in popular culture or in the policy world. Among people with bachelor’s degrees or higher, the unemployment rate is 4.3 percent — close to the number that the Federal Reserve would accept as “full employment” if it applied to the country as a whole. I hate to use the phrase “skilled labor,” as it seems like a pretty haughty thing for a guy with a degree in theater who can’t change a tire to say, but the truth is that the economy has been unforgiving to those who tried to go right from high school into a trade.  

The result is that we have 46 million people living below the poverty line — and for the most part, living there quietly.

And then he says: “America can’t afford 46 million poor without raising taxes on the rich.”

As many no doubt know, I’m open to more progressive taxation on the wealthy, and especially the super-duper-wealthy. But is wealth redistribution the answer to poverty? Could we ever, even in the most optimistic light, expect to be able to tax the wealthy enough to make up the gap, and bring the poor above the poverty line? Is a model that creates economic growth by taxing the wealthy, subsidizing the poor, and seeing economic growth proceed from there one that could possibly be sustainable?

I am very dubious. Not that I don’t think the rich can afford, and maybe should be paying, more money for more government projects, money to the space program, infrastructure, and maybe even expanding medicare or shoring up Social Security.

One more thing: I commonly argue that context matters, and that it’s a worthwhile thing to consider modern American poverty in the light of worldwide poverty, both present day and historically. The common response to this is the same one the author brings up. That is, yes, poverty in America may be much better than poverty in Nigeria, but “is ‘better than Nigeria’ really a standard we want to adopt in judging American economic conditions?”

Of course not. But if you never stop to appreciate what you have achieved, and what few successes you’ve won, how do you know you are making any progress at all? Moreover, what’s the point in trying to make progress? No point in fighting a war on poverty, because as long as anybody has less than anybody else, you’ve accomplished nothing.

I’m rambling. It’s late. I should go to bed. I just happened to read that Op-Ed in The Daily, and I thought I would share it.

Good night to all, and good morning to many.

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