No Class Warfare, Please: We’re Americans

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http://www.alternet.org/media/no-class-warfare-please-were-americans




In a year that has featured increased coverage of rising economic inequality—helped along by President Barack Obama’s call to rebuild the economy from the “middle out,” and New York mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio’s campaign focus on a “tale of two cities”—one of the biggest flurries of attention came in late July, when four professors from Harvard and Berkeley released a study (NBER, 7/13) of economic mobility in the United States. Their finding: People hoping to lift themselves from the bottom of the income scale into the middle class or above face much longer odds in certain parts of the country, particularly the Deep South.
As a result, reported David Leonhardt in a front-page story in the New York Times ( 7/22/13):

On average, fairly poor children in Seattle—those who grew up in the 25th percentile of the national income distribution—do as well financially when they grow up as middle-class children—those who grew up at the 50th percentile—from Atlanta.

The report made headlines across the nation. “Upward Mobility Is Bay Area Challenge,” reported the Tampa Bay Times ( 7/23/13). “People born poor [in Ohio urban areas] are more likely to stay poor,” wrote the Cincinnati Enquirer ( 7/23/13). The PBS NewsHour ( 7/24/13) brought on one of the study’s authors, Harvard economist Raj Chetty, to try to answer the question, “Is the American dream alive, and how does it vary across areas of the U.S.?”

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria devoted two separate segments to the story ( 8/4/13, 8/18/13). First Zakaria interviewed Chetty—plus self-proclaimed “radical centrist” economist Jeff Sachs, libertarian columnist Megan McArdle and Brookings Institution inequality skeptic Scott Winship—to discuss the study. He then delivered an on-air op-ed that cited Canadian economist Miles Corak as noting that “America spends much less on the education and well-being of poor people, especially poor children, than any other rich country”—though Zakaria also noted that “the U.S. has many more broken families, single parents and dysfunctional domestic arrangements than Canada and Europe.”

[WinkyDink]

1. "Class Warfare": The Biggest Con By The 1% On the Rest of Us But Especially Middle-Class Republicans

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2. We are becoming more Roman as time goes on, not enough to

produce a Spartacus, though Edward Snowden proved what a Herculean task it is just to expose the apparatus used to ensure our safety against ourselves . Ike was the last President to identify the Danger in immense, unchecked wealth, and the result of it .