INEQUALITY MATTERS

Reviewed 9/13/2013

Inequality Matters, by James Lardner

INEQUALITY MATTERS The Growing Economic Divide in America and its Poisonous Consequences James Lardner (ed.) David A. Smith (ed.) Bill Moyers (Fwd.) New York: The New Press, 2005				Rating: 5.0 High
ISBN-13 978-1-56584-995-2
ISBN-10 1-56584-995-7	328pp.	HC/GSI	$25.95

A conference was held in June 2004 at New York University. Organized by Demos,1 the conference was sponsored by the AFL-CIO, ACORN, United for a Fair Economy, the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for American Progress, The Economic Policy Institute, the National Council of Churches, the NAACP, and the Center for the Advancement of Health — among other organizations.

This book is the result. It is a compilation of essays by the volume's editors and various others, including well-known figures like Barbara Ehrenreich and David Cay Johnston.

As you can discern from the table of Contents, the essays cover the spirit, the letter, and the numbers of the story of inequality. It is a story, still unfolding, of the nation's wealth gravitating upwards to the already wealthy. Bill Moyers leads off with "The Fight of our Lives", painting the big picture in words that ring. Heather Boushey and Christian E. Weller illuminate "What the Numbers Tell Us." Barbara Ehrenreich shows us glimpses of life in the trenches with "Earth to Wal-Mars." David Cay Johnston covers "The Great Tax Shift." Other authors discuss health care, jobs, and the politics of inequality. Finally come a set of notes for each essay and a list of contributors.

America's Gini Index 2

From Wikpedia comes an update on the Gini Index. Notice how the 2 top income brackets grow markedly, while the others mostly shrink.

Income Bracket	Percent of population
(2010 dollars)	(1979)	(2010)
$15,000-$24,999	14.6%	13.7%
Under $15,000	11.9%	12.0%
$25,000-$34,999	12.1%	10.9%
$35,000-$49,999	15.4%	13.9%
$50,000-$74,999	22.1%	17.7%
$75,000-$99,999	12.4%	11.4%
$100,000-$149,999	8.3%	12.1%
$200,000 and over	1.2%	3.9%
Total households	80,776,000	118,682,000
Pre-tax Gini	0.404	0.469

"The closest thing to a standard measure of economic inequality is the Gini coefficient, developed nearly a century ago by an Italian statistician of that name. The Gini coefficient ranges from 0 (where everyone's income is exactly the same) to 1 (where all the income goes to a single person, leaving the rest of the population with nothing). Between 1968 and 1992, the Gini coefficient of the United States rose from 0.388 to 0.434—an increase of almost 12 percent. There are other ways to measure inequality, but almost regardless of the one you choose, it is higher than it has been in many decades; most economists believe that the distribution of wealth as well as income is more unequal today than it has been since before the onset of the Great Depression."

– Pages 27-28

The stories contain stunning insights — or insights that would be stunning if they were not common-sense knowledge that tends to be forgotten in today's media-dominated milieu of high-tech medical breakthroughs, great wealth, and the intermittently-reported crimes of the wealthy. Perhaps the most noteworthy is that health care is not the best way of making a population healthy.

"It is one of the great and sobering truths of our profession that modern health care probably has less impact on the population than economic status, education, housing, nutrition and sanitation," Theodore Cooper, assistant secretary for health while Gerald Ford was president, observed in 1976. "The notion of high-quality medicine as the answer to illness," Cooper said, is "a fiction, a hoax."

– Page 103

If you look at the big picture, then, it becomes painfully clear that the trends in economics and society over the last forty years have eroded the prosperous middle-class life of preceding decades in several ways:

Union representation has declined to single-digit percentages, bringing a general reduction in hourly pay rates.
Most young married couples have had to work to make ends meet, which meant the added expense of child care.
Health care became steadily more expensive at a rate faster than inflation, as more and more employers dropped or reduced health insurance for their employees.
Company pensions too have largely disappeared, replaced by personal retirement accounts of several sorts. And fewer and fewer employers are matching employee contributions.
A great many manufacturing jobs moved out of the U.S. in search of lower payroll costs.
There was also a shift away from manufacturing industries as financial services advanced to forty percent of job-market share.
Corporate implosions like Enron and Global Crossing left many out of work and without savings.
The Great Recession boosted unemployment to over ten percent, and the housing bubble collapse threw millions out of their homes.
The cost of higher education doubled or tripled over the period, and many colleges tilted their financial aid toward the well-to-do.3

Add in the continued tipping of the wealth balance toward the already wealthy segment of the population,4 the ongoing political campaign to remove still more of their tax burden, the deregulation of risky financial practices,5 and you begin to understand the growing concern on the part of so many6 about the future of this country.

This book is a well-researched and useful compendium of material, providing a good overview of the various aspects of the situation. It's dated, but essential reading. Research on inequality continues, even as inequality widens. Bill Moyers called it "The Fight of Our Lives" and he's been in that fight right up to today with his shows on Public Television. I'll let him have the last word.

There's no question about it: the corporate, political, and religious right are remaking American life according to a blueprint that only they understand, because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready to retire; and they are systematically stripping government of its capacity to do much more than reward the rich and wage war."

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"The unmitigated plunder of the public trust has spread a spectacle of corruption across America. For its equivalent one has to go back to the first Gilded Age, when the powerful and the privileged controlled politics, votes were bought and sold, legislatures corrupted, and laws flagrantly disregarded, threatening the very foundations of democracy. It was a time—now is anothere‐when the great captians of industry and finance could say, with Frederick Townsend Martin, "We are rich. We own america. We got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it."

And they will, unless, reading this book, you get mad—mad enough to get organized.

– Bill Moyers, Pages 11 & 13

1 James Lardner describes Demos as "a think-and-action tank committed to the pursuit of broader economic opportunity and a more robust democracy." (Page 17)

2 These figures are derived from the 2010 census. The Wikipedia article makes it clear that the Gini Index has its limitations. As long as methods are consistent, however, it is a useful way of tracking changes in economic equality from year to year.

3 Public Universities Ramp Up Aid for the Wealthy, Leaving the Poor Behind

4 Wealth Inequality in America (November 2012)

5 How banks, government fail Americans: Investigating what went wrong (By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, February 7th, 2011)

6 It's important to remember that this includes a number of very wealthy people. They include, but are not limited to, George Soros and Warren Buffett.

Table of Contents for Inequality Matters