JoeF at Apathy, Inc.:
Sebastian Holsclaw has a post up about the standard of living for lower income Americans and why it's not as bad as the numbers on income distribution and income mobility would make it seem.
Basically, the point of this is to show that, even as the system slowly produces a permanent underclass, those in the underclass will be comfortable. Or at least distracted.
The real debate here should be about how willing we are, as a society, to create a permanent underclass. Sure, there will be the occasional success story (professional entertainers, lottery winners, and even the occassional one who gets rich in the business world through hard work). But the current path will most likely lead to a destruction of the American Dream for a good portion of the population. Instead, they will face a lifetime of subsistence employment. Working a job they don't like so they can afford to keep paying off their credit cards, mortgages or rent, and insurance. Plus food and stuff.
This is something that's on the horizon, and barring any serious policy shifts, it's something that's going to begin coming to a head as the next generation (maybe two) begins to enter the workforce. At least, that's my take on the numbers.
Joe is right…it's a matter of priorities.
It's a simple thing to know what the priorities are. Take a look at the things people want to let the market control…health care, education, you know the list already. This are the things that aren't important. The important stuff…rebuilding NYC and DC, pork added to spending bills, wars, tax cuts…are just done, and all the other details have to adjust around them.
Remember that. When someone says a thing should be managed by market forces, they are saying market forces are more important than the thing being managed.
Posted by P6 at January 28, 2004 10:55 AM
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Comments
Actually, I don't know what it means for
"a thing to be managed by market forces"
There are two different issues here:
- leaving the poduction to the private sector
- subsidizing those that can't afford to pay market prices.
For instance, food is important, but we are happy to have it produced by the private sector.
Posted by dof at January 28, 2004 12:24 PMI don't think we are creating a permanent underclass (a huge part of the reason our numbers look odd is because we have an influx of low skilled immigrants, though unlike many conservatives that doesn't bother me in itself).
But if you insist on using 'underclass' I would say that historically the problem with underclasses is that they have been horribly impoverished in absolute terms--they were starving, homeless, forced to worked 18 hour days to survive, etc. So if the effect of the market is to take away the misery of the underclass, I'm ok with that. The critique of the underclass was usually that they led horrible lives. If you want to change the critique to something which decries having plenty, but less than you want, you are free to do so. But it isn't in line with old rhetoric about 'underclass' and in my view it loses much of its moral force.
Posted by Sebastian Holsclaw at January 28, 2004 04:15 PMNo, the problem with having an underclass that can be recognized and categorized as such is that it is a betrayal of our rhetoric about America. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has been talking about this recently: we have a growing black middle class, and that's terrific, but we also have about the same percentage of black children in poverty as we did when MLK died, and that's disgusting.
Nor does the federal government fool around with what it designates as poverty. When you are below the poverty line, you are honest-to-God poor, and a cheap 29" TV is not your priority.
Poverty in itself is unfortunate, but what strikes me as even more unfortunate is hopelessness, the intergenerational passing-on of poverty, the sense that one's family always has been poor and always will be poor. Immigrants often are fortunate in that respect, because they don't start out with a history of their parents' having gotten their asses kicked by America. Immigrants think, "We're poor now, but our kids won't be."
So I wouldn't even put people who just got here as part of the underclass, even if they don't have much money, because they are not yet part of a class. They are still getting processed into their place in the American socioeconomic structure. The urban and very rural poor aren't; they are a class nearly as much as Untouchables were.
Posted by PG at January 28, 2004 04:25 PMYou use allusive metaphors that really fall apart under examination. Saying that the urban poor are in a class 'nearly as much as Untouchables' is precisely akin to saying the Democratic party is political as were Communists. The sentence is strictly true, but all of its rhetorical power is focused completely wrong. You might as well say that science is a mode of thinking much like fundamentalist Christianity. I can't tell if you really think these things, or if you are just getting caught up in your own rhetoric. (I'm not saying I'm immune to doing that myself, maybe that is why I recognize it.)
As for the underclass. Isn't there some pretty strong evidence that government dependency is a large part of what creates the 'underclass' in the US? Such disparate pundits as Thomas Sowell and William Raspberry seem to think so.
As for the poverty line, you may or may not be truly poor, depending upon the standard of living on where you live. Poverty line in San Fransisco is probably homeless. Poverty line in Arkansas is not so bad. It also depends on how many people you live with, and how much government assistance you get. Real poverty I think needs to be alleviated. There isn't any reason for starvation in the US. But relative poverty doesn't bother me. And pretending that the 'need' to alleviate relative poverty should be as pressing or have the same moral force as the need to alleviate absolute poverty strikes me as a rhetorical ploy. If you want to convince me that relative poverty needs drastic action, you are going to have to do a lot more than merely use the word 'poverty' to describe the bottom 15% of wage earners. Unless you desire perfect wage parity for all jobs, there will always be a bottom 15%. At some point that just doesn't matter. Probably we aren't at that point. But your rhetoric doesn't even allow for it.
Posted by Sebastian Holsclaw at January 29, 2004 03:13 AMAs for the underclass. Isn't there some pretty strong evidence that government dependency is a large part of what creates the 'underclass' in the US? Such disparate pundits as Thomas Sowell and William Raspberry seem to think so.
They're wrong.
(and the temptation to end the response there is astounding)
That someone winds up on the bottom is just the nature of hierarchical organization. That it's largely Black folks on the bottom is the result of our being enslaved (and I count Jim Crow days in this)some five times longer than we've been free. That and the mainstream backlash that follows every advance a Black community makes.
This is undeniable physical fact, and any theory that hides that is simply wrong.
At worst, "government dependance" takes the form of civil service being the employer of choice because it's always the first major social institution to yield to anti-racism laws.
Posted by P6 at January 29, 2004 04:23 AM