It wasn’t supposed to work out this way. Barack Obama’s presidency was supposed to usher in The Great Liberal Restoration. With a conservative interregnum finally over, America could be nudged back onto the path toward becoming a European-style social welfare state. Here on the third anniversary of Obama’s 2008 election, however, those dreams lay in tatters. A recent poll by The Hill found that only one-in-three likely voters blames Wall Street for the country’s financial troubles, whereas 56 percent blame Washington. The public thinks the $800 billion Keynesian stimulus package was a miserable failure. ObamaCare is growing more unpopular by the day. Cap-and-trade is as dead as the dinosaurs. But left-of-center politicos think they might be getting a second bite at the apple. With the economy moribund—today’s anemic jobs report was more evidence of that—perhaps they can leverage the Occupy Wall Street movement into a broad backlash against business, markets, and free enterprise. (Oh, and against Republicans, too, natch.)
Which explains the sudden obsession with U.S. income inequality. This is the one-sentence story now being sold to America: “The middle-class is no better off than it was 30 years ago because the rich greedily grabbed all the money.” If this narrative—that America’s experiment with freer markets, lower taxers, and lighter regulation was a failure—can be successfully planted, it will be easier for Washington to tax, spend, and regulate in the future. And to elect politicians pushing that agenda.
On its face, the whole storyline’s a laugher—at least to anyone who lived through both the terrible, volatile, inflation-wracked 1970s and then the 25-year boom that followed. Indeed, brand-new research from the University of Chicago and Notre Dame finds “median income and consumption both rose by more than 50 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2009.” Incomes are never equal, of course. And the rich did somewhat better for a variety of reasons, including America’s failed government school system that can’t produce enough skilled workers for America’s high-tech economy.
But the last thing the U.S economy, stuck in slow-growth mode, needs is Buffett Rules, higher taxes, and more market-distorting regulation. In the new book Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee offer some suggestions: pay teachers more but eliminate tenure, keep kids in school longer, encourage high-skill immigration, teach entrepreneurship in high schools, cut regulatory barriers to business creation, and cut payroll taxes.
Then again, that’s no way to gin up a mob. http://blog.american.com/2011/11/why-ows-and-obama-are-obsessed-with-inequality/
No comments:
Post a Comment