Inequality threatens the American dream

Tickets to the election costing up to four thousand dollars. Under a tent, waiters served wine and cocktails. The audience was comprised of Democratic Party donors, many of whom reside in Potomac, a village forest and ostentatious mansions contained in all the richest places in the United States. It was on Tuesday, May 13. In some neighborhoods in Potomac, the average annual household income of over half a million dollars. If there is a country of 1% in this country, or 0.1% – the elite of the elite, is in Potomac or any similar locations around the capital, Washington.

Bill Clinton, U.S. president from 1993 to 2001, he was the star of that meeting to raise funds. Clinton went there to support Anthony Brown, a candidate of his party, the Democrat, in the primary for governor of Maryland, where the state is Potomac. The president has not lost the self-confidence and the ability of seduction. ” Maryland is a good example of the simple message I try to bring to America every day: there are places in this country where prosperity is more distributed while inequality increases,” he said. Brown raised nearly a million dollars in that act.

A few years ago hearing the word of mouth inequality Clinton, and before an audience like the Potomac, would have been unusual. The phrase does not appear in any of the annual speech on the state of the Union who spoke when he was president. Its economic rhetoric, similar to the third way in Europe, put the emphasis on growth, welfare state reform and deficit reduction.

Now it’s different. The growing inequality of income and wealth is at the center of debate in America. President Barack Obama has made the equal opportunities the centerpiece of his economic discourse. The anti-elitist populism defines a left discourse in preparing for the post- Obamaism. Conservatives no longer avoid talking about income disparity and the gap between social classes. And in Rome the pope Francisco, with his reflections on the excesses of unbridled capitalism, has become an unwitting ally of Obama and stimulus for the right review its harshest messages.

The book of the year and perhaps of the decade is a volume of over 600 pages of a French economist Thomas Piketty, hitherto unknown to the public, but in a few weeks in the U.S. has risen to the status of superstar with a treaty wealth of data demonstrates the taste – very American – increasing inequality to levels approaching those of the nineteenth century. The comparison with the nineteenth century is not based only on income disparity, while the real wages of the American working class has barely increased since the seventies, wages 1 % more income rose by 165 %, according to data cited by Paul Krugman, Nobel, but the disparity of wealth. Returns the spectrum rentier society, marked by inheritance: the idea that the children and grandchildren of the Potomac rich ruling class will continue for generations.

“Inequality reached its lowest tide in the United States between 1950 and 1980: 10 % higher in the hierarchy of income had between 30% and 35% of national income in the U.S., about the same level as France today ” Piketty writes in his book, Capital in the XXI century. ” Since 1980, however, income inequality in the U.S. has exploded. The share of top 10% rose from 30 % -35 % of national income in the seventies to 45 % -50 % in the decade of 2000. ” The 1% increase over revenues is even stronger.

The Piketty hobby has a cost. Critics scrutinize interpretive errors and failures in the book. This weekend, the Financial Times has published research that casts doubt on the calculations and methods of the French economist. So much to question one of his conclusions: that inequalities in wealth have returned to levels before the First World War.

The English translation of Capital in the XXI century has climbed the bestseller lists in the wake of other books that defined academic controversies of his time. He did Francis Fukuyama in The End of History. Published after the fall of the Berlin Wall, book Fukuyama theorized about the triumph of liberal capitalism. A few years later, another American political scientist, Samuel Huntington, when diagnosed with the clash of civilizations, written during the Balkan wars of the nineties.

Now if you talk about inequality in America, not by Piketty. “It happens that books surfing wave,” said in a telephone interview the historian Michael Kazin, a professor at Georgetown University and director of the progressive magazine Dissent. At the time of the conversation Kazin was submerged, as part of the leftist intelligentsia in this country, in reading the book. Piketty has captured what the Germans call the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.

“The Book of Thomas Piketty is so successful because U.S. society is very concerned about the enormous growth in inequality that has occurred since the seventies,” he says in an email, economist Emmanuel Saez. Saez, a professor at the University of Berkeley, has been one of the closest collaborators of Piketty recovery in thorough historical statistics on the concentration of income and wealth. ” The book is particularly successful in the U.S. because warning against the return of the holding company, in which the heirs end up prevailing. This strikes a chord in America, a country that was founded on the basis of meritocratic ideal “, Saez argues.

Inequality worsened during the years of Ronald Reagan in the White House, one Republican who believed in market deregulation and tax cuts – and continued with Clinton. The Great Recession, which originated in the housing bubble of the past decade, has left more unemployment and a middle class that has seen their income reduced and the distance to the 1%, which left the enlarged crisis unscathed. The worst – terror to fall into the abyss, to rush to a large extent similar to that of the thirties – depression has passed. And, looking at the landscape after the storm, when the problem is inequality arises in the foreground.

“There is less fear for the short term and the long term fear ” notes from Chengdu (China) economist Tyler Cowen, a professor at George Mason University, just outside of Washington, and author of Average is over [ ran mediocrity ]. Cowen describes in his book a developed world where people with a high level of education and technological skills will thrive and accumulate more profits, and those who lack this training will close the entrance to the best jobs and the best neighborhoods. A dystopia: developed and democratic countries divided between those who have (and know cope with machines) and those who do not (and do not know); among residents of villages like Potomac and people who subsist in precarious employment and the minimum wage.

The question of the effect of inequality on the quality of democracy, or democracy to dry, it becomes relevant. ” Then as now,” Krugman has written in reference to the France of the Third Republic, “an immense wealth can buy a huge influence not only on the policies adopted, but in the political discourse.” Cowen, an economist close to positions in the U.S. would be called libertarian and liberal Europe, does not deny the existence of inequalities and its possible deleterious effect on democracy if part of the population away from the institutions. Most members of the U.S. Congress are millionaires today. Political scientists like Nicholas Carnes, of Duke University, see a direct relationship between social class of legislators and disregard for policies that benefit the middle class.

For decades, the right to inequalities in the U.S. were no problem. The problem was the lack of opportunity, but as this was the country of the social ladder, the American dream, everything seemed settled. Clinton himself, who is a Democrat, barely spoke when he was president of inequality (and the Republican Reagan and Bush Sr. and son, less). The revolt of the Tea Party- the populist conservative movement that erupted after the arrival of Obama Democrat to the White House in 2009, and marked the agenda of the Republican Party over the years, put the left on the defensive. The tax cuts and spending cuts monopolized economic discourse. In two years this has changed. In the 2012 presidential election, the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, paid dearly for his image of the American plutocrat off on foot. The paralysis of social mobility became a widely accepted fact, left and right. Since then the fight against inequality is part of the vocabulary mitinero Obama. What is striking is that conservatives have endorsed this speech.

To Piketty, the cause of inequality is to be found in the accumulation of capital income, which grew at a faster pace than the economy, opening the gap between the middle and wealthier classes. For Cowen, however, is the technological gap. For Charles Murray, surely the most compelling intellectual in the U.S. right now, the inequalities are real and threaten the cohesion of the U.S., but not explained by differences in income, nor fiscal policies, but by differences or cultural value.

Coming apart at the trial. The state of white America, 1960-2010 [ The detachment. The State of White America, 1960 – 2010 ], Murray explains the decline of the white working class by its detachment from the sixties, to what he considers the U.S. founding virtues: piety, diligence, honesty and marriage. The members of this class, exposes the author, marry less, work less, go to jail and less frequent church elites (Murray divorced once, is agnostic and supports gay marriage). They have entered a spiral that distance them increasingly industrious, religious elites, whose members are likely to marry each other and, therefore, to breed smarter children (the use of IQ in their studies is one of the aspects most Discussed this intellectual).

Murray has not read Piketty, said in an email. When asked why in the U.S. political debate revolves around suddenly inequality, responds: ” Because the social democratic left finally managed to elect one of their own U.S. president and the American Left, while it has become more like the European left, where inequality has dominated the debate for decades. “

“Inequality matters because in real society people evaluate their economic well-being in relation to others,” observes pikettyano Saez. “So the inequality will always be a problem in any society, no matter how rich it is. That said, people are more willing to consider just inequalities based on the merit of the inheritance. “

“The middle class is disappearing. Feel insecure, “says Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, an agency of the left wing of the Democratic Party group. ” They do not find employment, wages do not rise, conservatives dismantle their benefits. People feel inequality. The Americans do not dislike the rich. Aspire to be rich. But they worry the decline of the great middle class was built after the Second World War. They knew what was security, opportunity, possibility of sending children to college. Now all this is under threat. “

” I do not think Americans are concerned that the rich earn more. They worry that their wages are stagnant. Americans are not receptive to the discourse on inequality, “says Cowen. “In this country the envy is directed especially to the people you went to school, your relatives, your friends.”

There is inequality which should alarm policymakers and citizens, but the obstacles of the poor to escape poverty, argues Robert Doar, who was commissioned in the Human Resources Administration of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The billionaire Bloomberg left the position in December. His successor, Democrat Bill de Blasio, became mayor with the flag of the struggle against inequality, which had worsened during the 12 years of Bloomberg.

“Mobility and poverty are more important and deserving of our attention that inequality issues,” Doar says the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the laboratory ‘s most influential ideas of the right of the U.S., where now works. He added that he is concerned that the “obsession” for wanting the rich lose income or assets does not end hurting the poor. If the rich are less rich, continues, the economy falter and unemployment will grow. And in a rich country with less tax revenue is reduced because if they lose income and assets, you pay less tax.

What they have in common these conservative – Cowen, Murray, Doar – shun is not the issue of inequality, although differing causes and solutions. The intellectual debate, instigated from institutions like AEI, where they cooked since the Reagan revolution to the invasion of Iraq, reflecting political change: after years of individualism of the Tea Party, the Republican Party has realized that risks losing the ideological initiative and appear as an unsympathetic, insensitive to the hardships of the working class party, it can be lethal. Right strives to articulate conservatism with a human face.

And on the left is reborn a new populism, a word that in the U.S. lacks the negative connotations it has in Europe and Latin America. ” There demagogic aspects [ in American populism ], of course,” Kazin, author of The populist persuasion [ populist faith ], reference history in the U.S. on populism, published in 1995. ” But the core of populism ” he says, says, “is the requirement that the politicians are up to their word and the founding ideals of this country, which are that the elite must serve the interests of the people.” The meaning of populism in the U.S., is literal: the defense of the interests of the people against the elites. And not just the Tea Party represents this tradition.

” There is a long history in this country of progressive populism,” says Hickey. The activist reminds farmers in the nineteenth century were organized against the railway companies and monopolies, and the policies of President Franklin Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression of the thirties. It also contained elements populist discourse about the great society [ Great Society ] President Lyndon Johnson, which this week has been commemorated half a century. The great egalitarian society including measures in the field of civil rights, as the end of legal segregation; and the economy, such as the fight against poverty and the creation of free health insurance for those over 65 and those with less income.

Di Blasio, the new mayor of New York, renewed this tradition when in season, said that New York had become a Dickensian tale of two cities, a place where nearly 400,000 millionaires while nearly half of citizens living in or near the threshold poverty. The slogan of the Occupy movement, 99% vs. 1% – has been incorporated into everyday language. “Today, after four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices are unusually high, and those at the top has never been better,” Obama said in his last speech on the state of the Union, January. ” But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. The upward mobility has stalled. “

It was the first time Obama uttered the word inequality in his State of the Union, the annual ritual in which the presidents define their priorities. In the mouth of a brain instinctively centrist politician as he attempts to speak the language of populism sometimes sound forced. Nothing to do with Elizabeth Warren, Democratic senator from Massachusetts since January 2013 and star of the populist left. Harvard law professor and lawyer specializing in bankruptcy, Warren electrifies the progressive base with clear language against banks, large corporations and elites. ” She speaks the populist language,” says Kazin, in his book insists that populism, left and right, it is more a rhetorical than a political program.

“Introduce, Elizabeth, show yourself ! ” Shouted some people gathered this week to see Warren at a conference on the new populism organized by the Campaign for America’s Future at a hotel in Washington. They referred to the campaign for the Democratic nomination in the 2016 presidential election. Exsecretaria The State Hillary Clinton is the favorite, but if you have a little drawback is that it is populist, too close to Wall Street and associated presidential ProBusiness pro – big business – her husband, Bill Clinton.

” The ombudsman, the tribune of 99 %, Senator Elizabeth Warren,” said the presenter. “They tell me I have spent the day talking about populism, the power of people to bring about change in this country,” Warren said. “It’s something that I really believe.” The senator attacked the banks, who have overcome the crisis without any great banker go to jail; denounced the conglomerates that evade the payment of taxes; drew politicians negotiating FTAs with his back to the workers. “The game is rigged. And that’s not right, “he repeated like a refrain. His words had a leftist and deeply American timbre. Because this is not an anti- populism. Contrary. Populist Americans defend the system against those who think they have betrayed.

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Posted by Jamshed Sindhu on May 27 2014. Filed under USA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.