Whatever happened to sharing the pie of prosperity?

[babylonsister]

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1003/p09s01-coop.html

Whatever happened to sharing the pie of prosperity?
More Americans now see the US as a place of haves and have-nots. That wasn't supposed to happen.
By Harold Meyerson

from the October 3, 2007 edition


Last week, a friend in his 30s prodded me to explain how my generation, the boomers, had botched so many things. While not exactly conceding that we had, I said that the one thing none of us had anticipated was that America would cease to be a land of broadly shared prosperity. To be born, as I was, in mid-century, was to have come of age in a nation in which the level of prosperity continued to rise and the circle of prosperity continued to widen. This was the great given of our youth. If the boomers embraced such causes as civil and social rights and environmentalism, it was partly because the existence and distribution of prosperity seemed to be settled questions.

Nor were we alone in making this mistake. Our parents may have gone through the Depression and could never fully believe, as boomers did, that the good times were here to stay. They remembered busts as well as booms. But the idea that the economy could revert to its pre-New Deal configuration (in which the rich claimed all the wealth the nation created while everyone else just got by): Who, among all our generations and political persuasions, expected that?

Yet that's precisely what happened. Median family income over the past quarter-century has stagnated. The economic rewards from increased productivity, which went to working-class as well as wealthy Americans from the 1940s to the '70s, now go exclusively to the rich. The manufacturing jobs that anchored our prosperity were offshored, automated, or deunionized; lower-paying service-sector jobs took their place.

snip//

This equality of declining opportunity, however, isn't matched by an equality of perception. The percentage of Democrats who say America is divided between haves and have-nots has risen by 31 points since 1988; the percentage of Republicans, by just 14 points. Indeed, though that 13-point decline in Republicans who call themselves haves has occurred entirely since they were asked that question in 2001, the percentage of Republicans who say we live in a have/have-not nation has actually shrunk by one point since 2001. (It had increased 15 points from 1988 to 2001.)

Apparently, so great is Republicans' loyalty to the Bush presidency that they're willing to overlook their own experience. And, in many cases, they attribute the nation's transformation solely to immigration, rather than to the rise of a stateless laissez-faire capitalism over which the American people wield less and less power. Which helps explain why Republican presidential candidates bluster about a fence on the border and have nothing to say about providing health coverage or restoring some power to American workers.

But the big story here isn't Republican denial. It's the shattering of Americans' sense of a common identity in a time when the economy no longer promotes the general welfare. The world the New Deal built has been destroyed, and we are, as we were before the New Deal, two nations.

[rodeodance]

1. In Burma, the top does it by bloody force, while here in the US, it is done legally

[OwnedByFerrets]

2. You can thank Saint Ronnie for this....nt

[Demeter]

4. And Behind Saint Ronnie---Poppy Bush and Dick Cheney

and after them--W and the deluge!

Nothing succeeds like crime.

[Totally Committed]

3. Two words: Ronald Reagan

And his effing "trickle-down economy".

Which led to the neo-con revolution and their Corporate Personhood.

Which led to Bill Clinton and his deregulations, NAFTA, the embracing of the DLC, and welfare "reform".

Which led to the Bushies and their never-ending PNAC wars for oil, ballooning deficits, tax cuts for the rich, out-sourcing of jobs, collapsing infrastructure, and looting of the Treasury to benefit cronies.

Which led to the drowning of New Orleans and her poorest of the population.

And, this is where we are today -- Haves and Have Nots.

It all started with Reagan, but both Parties carried it on in his stead. BOTH PARTIES.


TC