Bush, Sr., Carter, and Clinton: One Voice for Democracy
Remember the good ol’ days when we could safely ignore the man in office? Remember when we could be so contemptuous of a peanut farmer in the White House that we never gave him a thought? The arrogance of youth and the newly-escaped-Southerner-from-the-South of one’s childhood to the milk and honey land of the Yankee and the California myth lent validity to contempt of good ol’ Jimmy Carter. But good ol’ Jimmy Carter kept on keepin’ on and did the right thing morally based on his personal compass which always seemed to point the ethical path.
Thank God for Jimmy Carter, older and wiser folks say now. Thank God for Jimmy Carter although his is a voice crying in the wilderness of public apathy. That he is validating public opinion against the current criminals in the White House makes the man a Patriot, as many of us are patriots who rail against the malfeasance and hypocrisy and overt criminal acts of our current set of politicians. Few of us are in a position to actually affect change in our country’s destiny.
The point is, the damages to life and liberty continue to occur. The gelding of the Constitution continues. Bush and Cronies are using the Bill of Rights for toilet paper and getting richer every day and there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop them. They are tampering with the bones of the vote and daily making decisions which further crush the poor and the near poor. That these events are beginning to affect a sociologically better off segment of the population in America and that these people protest is as meaningless as the cries of the folks in New Orleans who have yet to realize the promises made by Bush and Cronies.
The acts these elected officials commit are criminal acts: against our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, our collective Ethos and the moral definitions of what it means to be an American, and yet, our so-called law-makers are become law-breakers in collusion with the Bush outfit.
Nothing is changing. Have you noticed? Do you worry about Prosecutor Fitzgerald—and hope that his security is intense and loyal—since he, currently, is the only hope we seem to have to destroy the hanging webs of deceit passing for government these days?
We have to go back: we have to question everything Bush and Cronies have done to our country and we have to fix this mess, and in the meantime, we have to prevent any further damages to America by these so-called citizens.
Elder Bush needs to speak out. Clinton needs to speak louder. Carter needs to extend his support to the public trust more aggressively. Nothing short of these three remaining presidents joined in public outcry against the changing tides of American rights will suffice. Now is the time and the time is short.
__________________________________________________________________
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-carter14nov14,0,4392133.story?track=tothtml
This isn't the real America
By Jimmy Carter
JIMMY CARTER was the 39th president of the United States. His newest book is "Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis," published this month by Simon & Schuster.November 14, 2005IN RECENT YEARS, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican. These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights. Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.At the same time, our political leaders have declared independence from the restraints of international organizations and have disavowed long-standing global agreements — including agreements on nuclear arms, control of biological weapons and the international system of justice.Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of "preemptive war," an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes. Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by top U.S. leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world.These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation's tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained. Even with our troops involved in combat and America facing the threat of additional terrorist attacks, our declaration of "You are either with us or against us!" has replaced the forming of alliances based on a clear comprehension of mutual interests, including the threat of terrorism.Another disturbing realization is that, unlike during other times of national crisis, the burden of conflict is now concentrated exclusively on the few heroic men and women sent back repeatedly to fight in the quagmire of Iraq. The rest of our nation has not been asked to make any sacrifice, and every effort has been made to conceal or minimize public awareness of casualties. Instead of cherishing our role as the great champion of human rights, we now find civil liberties and personal privacy grossly violated under some extreme provisions of the Patriot Act. Of even greater concern is that the U.S. has repudiated the Geneva accords and espoused the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, and secretly through proxy regimes elsewhere with the so-called extraordinary rendition program. It is embarrassing to see the president and vice president insisting that the CIA should be free to perpetrate "cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment" on people in U.S. custody. Instead of reducing America's reliance on nuclear weapons and their further proliferation, we have insisted on our right (and that of others) to retain our arsenals, expand them, and therefore abrogate or derogate almost all nuclear arms control agreements negotiated during the last 50 years. We have now become a prime culprit in global nuclear proliferation. America also has abandoned the prohibition of "first use" of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear nations, and is contemplating the previously condemned deployment of weapons in space.Protection of the environment has fallen by the wayside because of government subservience to political pressure from the oil industry and other powerful lobbying groups. The last five years have brought continued lowering of pollution standards at home and almost universal condemnation of our nation's global environmental policies.Our government has abandoned fiscal responsibility by unprecedented favors to the rich, while neglecting America's working families. Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000 per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialized nations).I am extremely concerned by a fundamentalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable.As the world's only superpower, America should be seen as the unswerving champion of peace, freedom and human rights. Our country should be the focal point around which other nations can gather to combat threats to international security and to enhance the quality of our common environment. We should be in the forefront of providing human assistance to people in need. It is time for the deep and disturbing political divisions within our country to be substantially healed, with Americans united in a common commitment to revive and nourish the historic political and moral values that we have espoused during the last 230 years.
------------------------------------
November 14, 2005
Editorial
Stonewalling the Katrina Victims
Public outrage is clearly growing over the federal government's woefully inadequate program for housing the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Last week a group of survivors filed the first of what are likely to be several lawsuits alleging that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has failed to live up to its responsibilities. The recovery effort has been subject to blistering criticism from conservative, nonpartisan and liberal groups alike.
The same basic question is this: Why did the Bush administration focus on trailer parks built by FEMA - which is actually not a housing agency - instead of giving the lead role to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has so much experience on this issue?
Many, including the Brookings Institution and the conservative Heritage Foundation, urged the administration to switch on HUD's famously successful Section 8 program, which gives families government vouchers to find decent housing in the private real estate market. That program worked well after the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California. But the White House - which seems less interested in conservative philosophy about how to make government programs work than with simply cutting the amount of money that gets spent on poor people - has been working feverishly to cripple HUD and destroy the Section 8 voucher program for years.
So the administration rigged up a hastily thought out program that is less flexible and less helpful than Section 8 - and confusing in the bargain. Still focused on tax cuts for the wealthy, the administration is apparently hoping that people who need housing will be frustrated by the difficult process of applying for federal relief dollars and simply give up and go away.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
___________________________________________________________________
washingtonpost.com
No Recess
Monday, November 14, 2005; A20
RECESS APPOINTMENTS are a tool that presidents should use sparingly -- in egregious cases where congressional gridlock has been unfair to the nominee and unhealthy for government. The Bush administration, though, is said to be weighing a spate of recess appointments to the Federal Election Commission, where the terms of four of six commissioners have expired.
This would be a gross misuse of the recess appointment power, and if the reports that he's planning it are correct, President Bush ought to think again. The vacancies at the FEC -- one commissioner has left; three others continue to serve while they await successors -- aren't the product of congressional inaction. In fact, there haven't been any nominations for the Senate to act on. Rather, the recess appointments would let a bipartisan cabal evade examination of, and a vote on, nominees who will control the commission's direction.
The FEC is an agency designed for failure and accomplished at that mission. Its commissioners are evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, and they have more often acted in the interest of the politicians who appointed them than the election law they are supposed to enforce.
The reported slate of new commissioners includes more along the same lines, including a Republican campaign law expert with close ties to former House majority leader Tom DeLay and a Nevada lawyer who represented Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid in his 1998 recount but has little expertise in federal election law. Meanwhile, Democrats seem to be getting rid of the troublesome commission chairman, Democrat Scott E. Thomas, who's bucked party efforts to undermine the election law.
It's bad enough to oust an aggressive member and bring in more compliant commissioners to an already-feckless agency. Doing so without any opportunity for Senate scrutiny would be a particularly unfortunate approach to a commission that is, after all, supposed to ensure the functioning of the democratic system.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
__________________________________________________________________
washingtonpost.com
Class Matters
By Sebastian MallabyMonday, November 14, 2005; A21
Two months ago, in his prime-time address from New Orleans, President Bush called upon the nation to "rise above the legacy of inequality." He was joking, obviously. The president's congressional allies now propose to cut Medicaid, food stamps, free school lunches and child-care subsides. They do not propose to save money by undoing the tax cuts that have handed an average of $103,000 a year to people making over $1 million.
This is a scandal, and not because every liberal spending program deserves protection. It's a scandal because, whether you support this program or that, inequality is growing poisonous. The meritocratic premise of this country, essential to both its political consensus and its economic success, is starting to ring hollow.
I wish that statement could be dismissed as irresponsible class warfare. But in 1980, the top fifth of families earned 7.7 times as much as the bottom fifth; by 2001, that ratio had risen to 11.4. So even though the bottom fifth of households made modest gains, the inequality ratio jumped by almost 50 percent. If you measure inequality by wealth rather than earnings, the results are even more preposterous.
Inequality in the United States is now more pronounced than in any other advanced country. Comparing the top 10 percent of households with the bottom 10 percent, the United States during the 1990s was nearly twice as unequal as Sweden and about a third more unequal than France.
Why does this matter? Inequality is socially acceptable and even economically desirable to the extent that it reflects differences in talent, risk-taking and hard work. But if it reflects the circumstances of birth, it is immoral and wasteful. The problem with the 50 percent jump in the inequality ratio is that it gives the offspring of the rich such fundamentally different education, health care and social horizons that it's hard for the rest to catch up. Sharper class differences mean more rigid class differences as well. Talent is squandered.
It's not as though rags-to-riches stories were common in the first place. A classic study of children born between 1942 and 1972 found that fully 42 percent of those born into the poorest quintile ended up there also. But this immobility has grown worse: One Federal Reserve study found that in the 1970s, 36 percent of families remained in the same income bracket throughout the decade; in the 1990s, 40 percent were static. At the most selective private universities in 2003, more freshmen had fathers who were doctors than the combined total whose fathers were hourly workers, teachers, clergy or members of the military.
If this is morally intolerable and economically wasteful, what is government doing about it? Shockingly little, is the answer. According to data compiled by the Century Foundation, the U.S. poverty rate before accounting for the effect of government programs is fairly typical for an advanced country. But U.S. government interventions reduce the final poverty rate by just over a third, whereas Canada's cut it by nearly two-thirds, and those of Britain, Sweden and Holland cut it by about three-quarters.
The growth of inequality underlines the absurdity of the Bush tax cuts. Last time America threatened to become a class-bound society, in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, Teddy Roosevelt advocated an estate tax to reduce concentrations of wealth. In the new gilded age, Bush has repealed the estate tax. Go figure.
But liberals also deserve blame, albeit of a more subtle kind. They muddle their attacks on inequality by defending all government programs -- irrespective of whether these programs are focused on the poor or on the middle classes. Thus they proudly said no to Social Security reform, even though Republicans such as Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah were offering fixes that allowed benefits for the poor to keep growing. Thus they stand equally ready to fight cuts in Medicaid and Medicare, even though Medicaid is a genuinely essential program for the poor whereas Medicare funnels money to seniors, including a lot of rich ones.
Gene Sperling, Bill Clinton's national economic adviser, has just published the book of the moment in Democratic wonkland. Sperling makes a case for endless programs that government would probably screw up: empowerment zones (there's little academic evidence that these ever work), retraining grants (ditto), insurance against the risk that your mortgage becomes unpayable (why can't the market provide that?). The wishful proposals threaten to obscure Sperling's great ones: a more progressive tax system with expanded topping-up of wages for the lowest earners; revamped savings incentives that don't just line the pockets of the rich; and a big push on Head Start-type preschool programs, a proven formula for promoting class mobility.
So here's a plea to Democrats. I know you're better on inequality than the other guys. I know you don't like to be accused of class warfare, so you shy away from attacking inequality head-on and prefer to dream up trendy policies that address middle-class concerns in an era of globalization. But this trendy stuff is a mistake. Let individuals navigate the shift from sunset industries to sunrise ones, which they can do mainly on their own. The core problem is class, which increasingly is destiny.
mallabys@washpost.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Thank God for Jimmy Carter, older and wiser folks say now. Thank God for Jimmy Carter although his is a voice crying in the wilderness of public apathy. That he is validating public opinion against the current criminals in the White House makes the man a Patriot, as many of us are patriots who rail against the malfeasance and hypocrisy and overt criminal acts of our current set of politicians. Few of us are in a position to actually affect change in our country’s destiny.
The point is, the damages to life and liberty continue to occur. The gelding of the Constitution continues. Bush and Cronies are using the Bill of Rights for toilet paper and getting richer every day and there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop them. They are tampering with the bones of the vote and daily making decisions which further crush the poor and the near poor. That these events are beginning to affect a sociologically better off segment of the population in America and that these people protest is as meaningless as the cries of the folks in New Orleans who have yet to realize the promises made by Bush and Cronies.
The acts these elected officials commit are criminal acts: against our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, our collective Ethos and the moral definitions of what it means to be an American, and yet, our so-called law-makers are become law-breakers in collusion with the Bush outfit.
Nothing is changing. Have you noticed? Do you worry about Prosecutor Fitzgerald—and hope that his security is intense and loyal—since he, currently, is the only hope we seem to have to destroy the hanging webs of deceit passing for government these days?
We have to go back: we have to question everything Bush and Cronies have done to our country and we have to fix this mess, and in the meantime, we have to prevent any further damages to America by these so-called citizens.
Elder Bush needs to speak out. Clinton needs to speak louder. Carter needs to extend his support to the public trust more aggressively. Nothing short of these three remaining presidents joined in public outcry against the changing tides of American rights will suffice. Now is the time and the time is short.
__________________________________________________________________
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-carter14nov14,0,4392133.story?track=tothtml
This isn't the real America
By Jimmy Carter
JIMMY CARTER was the 39th president of the United States. His newest book is "Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis," published this month by Simon & Schuster.November 14, 2005IN RECENT YEARS, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican. These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights. Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.At the same time, our political leaders have declared independence from the restraints of international organizations and have disavowed long-standing global agreements — including agreements on nuclear arms, control of biological weapons and the international system of justice.Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of "preemptive war," an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes. Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by top U.S. leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world.These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation's tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained. Even with our troops involved in combat and America facing the threat of additional terrorist attacks, our declaration of "You are either with us or against us!" has replaced the forming of alliances based on a clear comprehension of mutual interests, including the threat of terrorism.Another disturbing realization is that, unlike during other times of national crisis, the burden of conflict is now concentrated exclusively on the few heroic men and women sent back repeatedly to fight in the quagmire of Iraq. The rest of our nation has not been asked to make any sacrifice, and every effort has been made to conceal or minimize public awareness of casualties. Instead of cherishing our role as the great champion of human rights, we now find civil liberties and personal privacy grossly violated under some extreme provisions of the Patriot Act. Of even greater concern is that the U.S. has repudiated the Geneva accords and espoused the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, and secretly through proxy regimes elsewhere with the so-called extraordinary rendition program. It is embarrassing to see the president and vice president insisting that the CIA should be free to perpetrate "cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment" on people in U.S. custody. Instead of reducing America's reliance on nuclear weapons and their further proliferation, we have insisted on our right (and that of others) to retain our arsenals, expand them, and therefore abrogate or derogate almost all nuclear arms control agreements negotiated during the last 50 years. We have now become a prime culprit in global nuclear proliferation. America also has abandoned the prohibition of "first use" of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear nations, and is contemplating the previously condemned deployment of weapons in space.Protection of the environment has fallen by the wayside because of government subservience to political pressure from the oil industry and other powerful lobbying groups. The last five years have brought continued lowering of pollution standards at home and almost universal condemnation of our nation's global environmental policies.Our government has abandoned fiscal responsibility by unprecedented favors to the rich, while neglecting America's working families. Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000 per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialized nations).I am extremely concerned by a fundamentalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable.As the world's only superpower, America should be seen as the unswerving champion of peace, freedom and human rights. Our country should be the focal point around which other nations can gather to combat threats to international security and to enhance the quality of our common environment. We should be in the forefront of providing human assistance to people in need. It is time for the deep and disturbing political divisions within our country to be substantially healed, with Americans united in a common commitment to revive and nourish the historic political and moral values that we have espoused during the last 230 years.
------------------------------------
November 14, 2005
Editorial
Stonewalling the Katrina Victims
Public outrage is clearly growing over the federal government's woefully inadequate program for housing the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Last week a group of survivors filed the first of what are likely to be several lawsuits alleging that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has failed to live up to its responsibilities. The recovery effort has been subject to blistering criticism from conservative, nonpartisan and liberal groups alike.
The same basic question is this: Why did the Bush administration focus on trailer parks built by FEMA - which is actually not a housing agency - instead of giving the lead role to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has so much experience on this issue?
Many, including the Brookings Institution and the conservative Heritage Foundation, urged the administration to switch on HUD's famously successful Section 8 program, which gives families government vouchers to find decent housing in the private real estate market. That program worked well after the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California. But the White House - which seems less interested in conservative philosophy about how to make government programs work than with simply cutting the amount of money that gets spent on poor people - has been working feverishly to cripple HUD and destroy the Section 8 voucher program for years.
So the administration rigged up a hastily thought out program that is less flexible and less helpful than Section 8 - and confusing in the bargain. Still focused on tax cuts for the wealthy, the administration is apparently hoping that people who need housing will be frustrated by the difficult process of applying for federal relief dollars and simply give up and go away.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
___________________________________________________________________
washingtonpost.com
No Recess
Monday, November 14, 2005; A20
RECESS APPOINTMENTS are a tool that presidents should use sparingly -- in egregious cases where congressional gridlock has been unfair to the nominee and unhealthy for government. The Bush administration, though, is said to be weighing a spate of recess appointments to the Federal Election Commission, where the terms of four of six commissioners have expired.
This would be a gross misuse of the recess appointment power, and if the reports that he's planning it are correct, President Bush ought to think again. The vacancies at the FEC -- one commissioner has left; three others continue to serve while they await successors -- aren't the product of congressional inaction. In fact, there haven't been any nominations for the Senate to act on. Rather, the recess appointments would let a bipartisan cabal evade examination of, and a vote on, nominees who will control the commission's direction.
The FEC is an agency designed for failure and accomplished at that mission. Its commissioners are evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, and they have more often acted in the interest of the politicians who appointed them than the election law they are supposed to enforce.
The reported slate of new commissioners includes more along the same lines, including a Republican campaign law expert with close ties to former House majority leader Tom DeLay and a Nevada lawyer who represented Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid in his 1998 recount but has little expertise in federal election law. Meanwhile, Democrats seem to be getting rid of the troublesome commission chairman, Democrat Scott E. Thomas, who's bucked party efforts to undermine the election law.
It's bad enough to oust an aggressive member and bring in more compliant commissioners to an already-feckless agency. Doing so without any opportunity for Senate scrutiny would be a particularly unfortunate approach to a commission that is, after all, supposed to ensure the functioning of the democratic system.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
__________________________________________________________________
washingtonpost.com
Class Matters
By Sebastian MallabyMonday, November 14, 2005; A21
Two months ago, in his prime-time address from New Orleans, President Bush called upon the nation to "rise above the legacy of inequality." He was joking, obviously. The president's congressional allies now propose to cut Medicaid, food stamps, free school lunches and child-care subsides. They do not propose to save money by undoing the tax cuts that have handed an average of $103,000 a year to people making over $1 million.
This is a scandal, and not because every liberal spending program deserves protection. It's a scandal because, whether you support this program or that, inequality is growing poisonous. The meritocratic premise of this country, essential to both its political consensus and its economic success, is starting to ring hollow.
I wish that statement could be dismissed as irresponsible class warfare. But in 1980, the top fifth of families earned 7.7 times as much as the bottom fifth; by 2001, that ratio had risen to 11.4. So even though the bottom fifth of households made modest gains, the inequality ratio jumped by almost 50 percent. If you measure inequality by wealth rather than earnings, the results are even more preposterous.
Inequality in the United States is now more pronounced than in any other advanced country. Comparing the top 10 percent of households with the bottom 10 percent, the United States during the 1990s was nearly twice as unequal as Sweden and about a third more unequal than France.
Why does this matter? Inequality is socially acceptable and even economically desirable to the extent that it reflects differences in talent, risk-taking and hard work. But if it reflects the circumstances of birth, it is immoral and wasteful. The problem with the 50 percent jump in the inequality ratio is that it gives the offspring of the rich such fundamentally different education, health care and social horizons that it's hard for the rest to catch up. Sharper class differences mean more rigid class differences as well. Talent is squandered.
It's not as though rags-to-riches stories were common in the first place. A classic study of children born between 1942 and 1972 found that fully 42 percent of those born into the poorest quintile ended up there also. But this immobility has grown worse: One Federal Reserve study found that in the 1970s, 36 percent of families remained in the same income bracket throughout the decade; in the 1990s, 40 percent were static. At the most selective private universities in 2003, more freshmen had fathers who were doctors than the combined total whose fathers were hourly workers, teachers, clergy or members of the military.
If this is morally intolerable and economically wasteful, what is government doing about it? Shockingly little, is the answer. According to data compiled by the Century Foundation, the U.S. poverty rate before accounting for the effect of government programs is fairly typical for an advanced country. But U.S. government interventions reduce the final poverty rate by just over a third, whereas Canada's cut it by nearly two-thirds, and those of Britain, Sweden and Holland cut it by about three-quarters.
The growth of inequality underlines the absurdity of the Bush tax cuts. Last time America threatened to become a class-bound society, in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, Teddy Roosevelt advocated an estate tax to reduce concentrations of wealth. In the new gilded age, Bush has repealed the estate tax. Go figure.
But liberals also deserve blame, albeit of a more subtle kind. They muddle their attacks on inequality by defending all government programs -- irrespective of whether these programs are focused on the poor or on the middle classes. Thus they proudly said no to Social Security reform, even though Republicans such as Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah were offering fixes that allowed benefits for the poor to keep growing. Thus they stand equally ready to fight cuts in Medicaid and Medicare, even though Medicaid is a genuinely essential program for the poor whereas Medicare funnels money to seniors, including a lot of rich ones.
Gene Sperling, Bill Clinton's national economic adviser, has just published the book of the moment in Democratic wonkland. Sperling makes a case for endless programs that government would probably screw up: empowerment zones (there's little academic evidence that these ever work), retraining grants (ditto), insurance against the risk that your mortgage becomes unpayable (why can't the market provide that?). The wishful proposals threaten to obscure Sperling's great ones: a more progressive tax system with expanded topping-up of wages for the lowest earners; revamped savings incentives that don't just line the pockets of the rich; and a big push on Head Start-type preschool programs, a proven formula for promoting class mobility.
So here's a plea to Democrats. I know you're better on inequality than the other guys. I know you don't like to be accused of class warfare, so you shy away from attacking inequality head-on and prefer to dream up trendy policies that address middle-class concerns in an era of globalization. But this trendy stuff is a mistake. Let individuals navigate the shift from sunset industries to sunrise ones, which they can do mainly on their own. The core problem is class, which increasingly is destiny.
mallabys@washpost.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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