Thank you. There most certainly has been class warfare going on for sometime now, and by the looks of things, the class that waged that war is winning.

Big time.

They're the only ones allowed to talk about class warfare, because if anyone in the bottom 95% does, they get called on it pretty quickly. I know I have. It is quite true that I do not understand "economics" per se, but I do understand where the policies of the last 20 or so years have landed me, and it doesn't take a degree in economics to understand I'm totally screwed. I am workng harder and longer for less.

What's left to understand?

CSPAN junkies visit http://spannerbackup.ipbhost.com

One of the most successful aspects of the big con is something Tom Frank discusses in "What's the Matter With Kansas?" and that is divorcing politics (in the news pages) from economics (on the business pages) as though there were no connection between the two and economics "just happens" by the invisible hand. Most of the public (including many small business owners) just has no idea how big business rigs the markets, garners subsidies and tax breaks and generally hogs everything on the old inverted Puritan principle that by prospering they must be God's elect and therefore entitled to more.

The estate tax is a good example, in that it really only affects a very, very small minority, but somehow everyone thinks that
since they might someday strike it rich, they don;t want there to be an estate tax (although that is changing).

Another aspect is that many journos and pundits these days come from the upper middle or lower upper class and are uncomfortable talking about class because they have become comfortable with it.

Will you be commenting on how the Democratic Party has facilitated this by through a mix of compromise, cowardice, and corruption that the GOP knows how to exploit tactically.

Curiously, the GOP obsession with sex seems to be their only tactical weakness.

::JRBehrman

While they may believe that tax cuts help the economy, their deeper belief is that every dollar they have, including the dollars they inherited, is a reflection of their success and a measure of their virtue. So, in this sense, supply-side ideology simply plays the same role that Social Darwinism did a century ago and that economic orthodoxy did seventy years ago.

As a former college professor, teaching up here in New Hampshire with its strong libertarian, individualist, anti-communal and small government traditions, this is an attitude I encountered often in my students, who seemingly drink it in with their mother's milk.

I often found that there was a general absence of intuitive appreciation for the innumerable ways in which one's own economic well-being depends on the work and virtues of other people, and on the virtues of the societies they have built. It should be obvious that a society's infrastructure, its educational system, its moral culture, and the mountain of public and private investments made over many centuries play a huge role in how much wealth flows to individuals in exchange for the work they do. Two individuals from different societies, with the same education and skills, and equal energy and industry, might receive dramatically different amounts of compensation for equivalent work, and will be faced with substantially different opportunities to apply the skills they do have in the most productive ways. So it should be obvious that a great deal of what flows to you has nothing at all to do with your personal contribution, but has been bequeathed to you by the society you live in.

For many of my students, however, there was an intuitive presumption that the invisible hand of the free market economy was the hand of providence itself, guaranteeing that everybody got precisely what they deserved. Even for those who recognized the practical necessity of taxation, taxation often seemed to bear the taint of original sin. It was a kind of organized stealing, even if an unavoidably necessary kind of stealing. The wages they received were primordially theirs, dispensed through the pure and natural justice of the free market system. Any government takings of those wages were a fallen, human distortion of that natural system, a corruption of the state of economic natural justice.

Re: The estate tax is a good example, in that it really only affects a very, very small minority, but somehow everyone thinks that
since they might someday strike it rich, they don;t want there to be an estate tax (although that is changing).

I suspect that most people know they are not going to striek it rich. Rather I think there is a great deal of ignorance out there as to how the estate tax works. Many people seem to think it affects all estates of any size and hence do not want to pay it when their parents die and pass on the family home and a small bank account or two. Also, by using the ridiculous name "death tax" the Right has managed to make it sound as the act of dying itself were being taxed and since everyone does, they manage to get everyone's attention.

Hi Don,

I think you are saying that the Constitution SHOULD trump class-based politics. But I think what Jon Chait is arguing is that the GOP (with respect to economic issues) ACTUALLY PRACTICES class-based politics.

Jay

The Constitution has prevailed. The Republicans have presuaded people to elect them. Chait may be exactly correct than nonsensiclal economics that predominately works against those who work for a living has been the driving force behind Republican campaigns. However, they have not succeeded by magic but by winning more votes more often.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

I have argued since the 1980 campaign that right wing claims that America society is rotting were correct - but that the rot was coming from the top.

I think Mr. Chait's argument fits in very well with my conclusion.

Noblesse Oblige used to be a real force in society, but that has been replaced with the idea that the amount of money one has shows one's worth - including one's moral superiority.

class

The trap: I'm in a post-industrial Vermont, Connecticut River town, where there's a strong sense of working class identity. That very identity emphasizes the advisability of not taking school seriously, since to do so is to betray the class of your parents and adopt an attitude the locals identify with the rich. So awareness of class identity, far from being a wellspring of Marxist or any other meaningful revolt, becomes instead a revolt against knowledge and against the very means by which their children may most dependably raise themselves. Class identity, as a concept, is in itself a tool of oppression. That's a serious, dangerous trap.

The inconsistency: Class is sometimes a synonym for wealth; but other times a marker for culture and learning. There's no single culture among the wealthy; and those with the most culture and learning are often indifferent to wealth. So what's our discussion here: Class as in "classy," or just as a somehow easier way to say "stinkin' rich"?

If "stinkin' rich," how do we differentiate between the rich of the old-money zip codes, who gave primarily to Kerry last time around, and of the new money neighborhoods, who of course mostly supported Bush? If the Republicans are to be accepted at the party of the rich, why are those who have grown up with wealth more likely to support Democratic policies, including even the estate tax? While the "entrepreneurs" may be Republicans in ideology, the rich, as a "class," are quite split between the parties.

So ... "class"? Is that the best term or concept we can come up with to leverage a better understanding of the Republican economic scam?

I don’t think “welfare” in the phrase “promote the general welfare” means the same as it does today. One can argue that strict regulation of the private economy by the government is better for the “general welfare” than more economic liberty, but that is a political debate, not a constitutional issue.

Interesting. I have found a similar attitude among young Black students I've worked with, mostly among young males, that taking education too seriously is "acting white" and knuckling under to the values of the dominant society. Students who want to succeed and get to college have to insulate themselves against this. It is not the same for immigrants, including African immigrants (we have several families from Eritrea), although more prevalent among Latino males.

I think it is a scam, though a successful one. It is tribal, though, more than class, and so atimized that the bottom half (or 3/4) is continually divided against itself.

"While they may believe that tax cuts help the economy, their deeper belief is that every dollar they have, including the dollars they inherited, is a reflection of their success and a measure of their virtue. So, in this sense, supply-side ideology simply plays the same role that Social Darwinism did a century ago and that economic orthodoxy did seventy years ago."

One reason you may be "uncomfortable about writing in such starkly class-based terms" is that you haven't taken the justifications for the above-quoted attitude far enough back.

Thinkers and writers on the left are more comfortable with doctrines that have a tinge of scientific legitimacy like economic orthodoxy and Social Darwinism even if it is just mathematical models and the invocation of the name of Darwin.

However, before economic models and Social Darwinism, attempts to justify the same attitude were more theistic.  For example, the Catholic and Calvinistic beliefs that worldly goods are evidence of God's grace.   In other words, all these arguments are a vestige of the doctrine of divine right which goes back beyond even the Pharoahs.  All are attempts to justify unearned wealth and power.

Maybe writing in class-based terms will be easier if you can either make or break the case for divine right. 

What's so difficult about understanding "general welfare"? There all sorts of statistics to measure it, and currently in the USA the gw is going south.

It becomes a constitutional issue when the "general welfare" has been demonstrably worsened by political actions. IOW it is unconstitutional to worsen the general welfare: increased poverty and worsening health statistics, etc.

upward redistribution of wealth

Unfortunately I see that as the driving force behind those same funders of many Democratic political operatives who have sat by and allowed these economic policies to be put in place. Do any of you really see a significant shift away from current policies that would actually stop what has been going on?

I think our society would have to undergo a dramatic overhaul in order to even discuss making things right. The same people who benefit from the GOP's economic agenda are the same people who buy politicians and own the media outlets. What grassroots godzilla will emerge to overthrow that deadly combination?

I don't think its news that the GOP's supply-side ideology is BS or that the GOP is classist. What I'm really interested in is what anyone is going to do to stop this train. I don't have faith in millionaire cowards to right these current and past wrongs.

Actually, I saw it growing up in backwoods New Brunswick, and I've seen it written about in places like Australia and England.

I don't think its a scam. In any community, people have to respect each other, they have to get along, they have to accept certain mores, customs and values. A poorer or tightly knit community relies more strongly on customs and values, because there's more interdependence.

Look at it this way. You're growing up in a working class neighborhood. You need to car pool to work with your fellow workers. You have to fix up the house, your neighbors help you. You need a babysitter, your neighbors pitch in. Recreation, socialization, work, pleasure, you depend on the people around you, and they depend on you.

That means that they have to know they can depend on you. That means that you've got to respect them, to identify yourself with them, so they identify themselves with you. You've got to be known at the bars, tell jokes they laugh at, give a solid, take a solid.

The more you step out of line in any way, the more you become strange, the more unreliable you become. All that antipathy to 'dirty stinking hippies' the hatred that bordered on violence, it was the dislike for an interloper who potentially entered the community, who took, but didn't give back, who wasn't reliable, who didn't identify with you and who you couldn't identify with, and so you couldn't trust him. And if you can't trust someone in a community, they're a drain, when resources are thin and you need people pulling together.

Now me, I grew up in an environment like that. I grew up smart, and perhaps a little alien, I wasn't much into sports. But I was tolerated and accepted because I wore ragged working clothes and had dirt under my fingernails, that no matter how much I liked books, they all saw me working on cars at the garage or hauling lumber. I was quiet and plain spoken and never put on airs. But even then there was suspicion that bookishness was an awkward alien thing to be discouraged.

Sometimes culture gets in the way. Smart people often see it. Talented people see it. Gays. It's just human nature.

Its a not a scam just a vestige of the hundreds of years of slavery, racism, terrorism and other horrible acts visited upon black people in America. Many black people are stuck in cyclical poverty that has at its heart poor education. This is never addressed by those unaffected by it and so it persists. It also sends a steady stream of slave labor into the nation's prison systems to enrich more GOP or Democratic wealthy people.

"General welfare" can be determined with statistics on mortality. incarceration, education, crime, vacation time and health, among others, and these can be readily compared to figures from other developed countries. Right now the USA doesn't look so good. I don't follow the presidential candidates that closely, but I think that John Edwards is discussing this subject. Anybody know?

Daniel,
Votes don't trump the Constitution, do they? If the Repubs canceled freedom of speech would you say okay, because they won more votes?

I understand that we have elections, what I'm suggesting is that there is a strong legal foundation for what liberals propound, that leftys don't have to be surrender monkeys in class warfare because they are fighting for the Constitution, that promoting the general welfare isn't just a pie-in-the-sky scheme to rob the rich--it's what the Constitution says we're to do. So cough up, you billionaires, this is America, love it or leave it.

O.K. I will put you in the camp with those who believe that all individual economic success is due to the State. Do you by inference believe that the fruits of the labor of all successful people rigntfully belongs to the State?

Dems = better Supreme Court, better NLRB, better regulatory bodies, and better every other piece of the federal bureaucracy.

But it does not help countering that belief that there are quite a few STATE estate taxes that are much lower in cut-off level than past/future Federal estate taxes. This is where many of the farm stories come from, STATE estate tax from surviving parent to children on valuable land still being farmed. It is also one reason gays are fighting for marital rights as a gay partner can get stuck with paying a state estate tax on the value of a home shared by partners, while most states do not tax home value or anything else for that matter as inheritance between husband/wife.

Really? Did the Republicans 'win more votes' in the 2000 election, or did they gain control by judicial fiat? What about the phone jamming scandal in New Hampshire, voter fraud in Ohio, the Diebold scam, etc. etc. etc.

Sounds like they really did win by magic--black magic.

It is my understanding that the effective tax rate at the Federal level is about 19% and it has been that for many years. What tends to cause the total tax rate to go up and down is the state and local taxes.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Looks like I won another one. Go lick your wounds and I will see you again soon.

ROTFL. That's your game: 1) You make a dishonest statement. 2) I object to your dishonest statement. 3) Then you declare victory?

That's beneath contempt. Funny, but trivial. Go lick your balls, if you've got any.

Daniel,

It's such a crucial point, I want to scream it. The average joe, not doing his own taxes and therefore not understanding them, sees only the cut out of his paycheck, which on the Fed part is mostly SS/FICA, and attributes that to those damn Congresspersons in Washington spending again. There is little awareness of how small the non-SS Fed take is, and how so many, with all the various credits, pay very little to the Fed government. (Or get more back than they pay in, as with EIC.) The GOP story, and, of course it is part of their ideology, is to shift all the burden to the states. Which it does. One interesting flip on that is that it can be argued that the homeowner deductions are a stealth way of getting local property taxes to pay for government. Another is something that Dems might like to hide: there is little awareness of how expensive SS is, with the employer paying the half not seen as deductions on the paycheck; I'm self-employed and see it, and am a strong supporter of SS, but still, people should be aware of its cost and what is done with those enormous funds as to the economy as a whole.

One could almost joke that they're immune to Marxist criticism because they never even reached the industrial revolution.

Um, I suppose, but it wouldn't be funny to anyone that studied a bit of actual history. New England was quite industrial in it's day.

Does "The rural South versus the Industrial North" ring any bells? 

There are some people you just can't talk to...and they proliferate in discussions of economics.

The right's "trickle down" theory was discarded by FDR in a speech in 1936 when he said, "But the trouble with that theory was that there was always too little left to trickle down more than halfway."
In another speech he talked of the importance of building from the bottom up - on the foundation of the common man.

The evidence has been around since Hoover that "trickle down" is just a euphemism for the rest of us getting pissed on my the well off, but anytime someone dares speak up, the trolls come out of the woodwork, mischaracterizing you statements, and general being obnoxious twits like this nut job. Don't engage. HE twists your words and proves nothing other than he can't last 2 minutes in a real conversation.

"ideology."

Is that the polite form of arrogant greed?

CSPAN junkies visit http://spannerbackup.ipbhost.com

You are making an ideological argument for income redistribution, economic isolation and a smaller military from my reading of your comments. That’s fine, I just think it is not fruitful to maintain that the constitution requires those policies.

If you read the rest of my comment you will realize that I maintain that making a constitutional argument for what life in the United States should be like is a fools argument I guess everyone would like to live in a land of milk and honey and not have to work very hard. I just don’t think the constitution can require that outcome.

How about this. I'm saying that relative economic success or failure of people operating in our economic system is dependent, first and foremost, in that they are operating in and embedded within our economic system.

People who succeed, succeed for a variety of reasons:

* First and foremost because they exist in an environment of the rule of law;

* Regional advantages and resources make a great difference. Silicon valley didn't emerge in Alabama, there's a reason for that. Not a lot of sofware, not a lot of hardware, not a lot of dot com or anything came out of there.

* Economic factors. In the middle of the depression it was a lot harder to be successful than in the roaring twenties, or the postwar boom.

* Social factors. Being born into money, having the right connections, the right training, education, upbringing, the right social networks and supports, the right contacts and connections.

* Hard work? Sure.

* Brilliance, smarts, hustle? Sure.

But are individual hard work and brilliance the determining factors? Only in idiot would argue that. You don't even argue that. You admit that lazy and stupid people are able to be successful.

And that's the really interesting question, isn't it? How is it that lazy and stupid people manage to succeed at all? How is it that the plain and the ordinary and the mediocre do so well in America?

Surely the ordinary people of America are nothing special. Surely they're no better and no worse than people the world over?
What makes America special, what makes Americans rich?

If it isn't American society, if it isn't the whole set of legal and cultural rules, the accumulated wealth of generations of education, of contributions, of vast resources, of millions of people building and building a nation, if the state is not a part of this... then what is?

Here's a question for you. What's the difference between America and Afghanistan? What's the difference between America and China, or America and Russia?

Brazil, China and Russia are huge countries. They've all got vast natural resources in their large territories, just like America. They've all got large populations. Long histories. Educated populations.

Surely their populations are on average as smart. Surely their populations are on average as hardworking. Maybe more hardworking, spend your life in backbreaking toil wading in rice paddies, that's hard work.

But why aren't these countries up there? If resources and history, if territory and population, if the human resource is comparable, what's the difference.

Different kind of state? A state organized to benefit the many rather than the privileged few? A rule of law dedicated to equality, rather than power? Regulations to prevent monopolies, to prevent environmental expropriation, to make sure that the economy plays fairly, to support critical economic sectors, to encourage innovation?

Here it is, smart boy.

Where does the rule of law come from, if not from a state? I'm not arguing about where that state comes from. I'm arguing that the state is an essential tool for the rule of law, it is an essential tool for ordering and organizing a society to be functional.

This is the Libertarian delusion. Well, we've seen plenty of 'Libertarian paradises.' We've seen them in Somalia, in Afghanistan, in the Congo. Countries where the state has withered away, vanished, dissolved, gotten off peoples backs. Instead of capitalist utopias, instead of freedom, they've turned into hells on earth.

I think you are confusing libertarians with anarchists. Even the most hard core libertarians that I am aware of agree that there have to be some rules of engagement for economic competition and don’t look to Afghanistan as an ideal model.

I still didn’t get a clear answer to my question from your screed. Do you think that in general someone who has achieved a high level of economic success in the United States can rightfully claim that he earned his wealth?

Robert, property is a human institution, not a fundamental metaphysical fact. The products of our labor - or rather the products of the long chain of labors of which our labor is just the last link - don't belong to us in any deep sense; nor I think do they belong in a deep sense to the state or the community. It's up to us to work out politically the rules and institutions of possession and exchange that make for the best society, and to find the right balance between personal and community control of value. We have nothing to go on but our experiential knowledge of what makes people happy. There are no primordial rights of possession.

In most cases, people who have succeeded economically, and who have reaped rewards from what they have produced, have expended significant effort. But there are two other factors that go into setting the reward that their efforts bring them; and of neither can the individual claim authorship. These two factors are the gifts of nature and the gifts of social advantage.

The latter concerns the contribution made by the human society into which you are born, and the place in that society you were born occupying. There is a famous saying of Isaac Newton's: "If I have seen further, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants." Newton expresses just one kind of awareness of the ways in which our achievements depend on the work and achievements of others. And anyone who succeeds economically in our society can say with equal justice, "If I have produced great things, it is because I have made good use of the great productive engine built and maintained by my ancestors and fellow citizens." One could have bottomless industry, but without the countless factors of production that are sustained by others in the world around you, the rewards for you efforts would be meager.

I am writing some words right now. If they have any value at all, that value derives almost entirely from the thinking others have done. Their thinking has been transmitted to me by many teachers, and my own transformative contribution has been vanishingly small by comparison. My head is filled with the knowledge, ideals, imaginings, and moral and intellectual disciplines that I did not author. The intellectual content itself is the work of millenia. And in my own case, many of my teachers were part of a public system of education nurturing human beings capable of literacy, critical thinking, problem solving and creativity.

There is another famous saying: "There but for the grace of God go I". This expresses an awareness of contingencties that go beyond the social ones, and reach deeper into the natural world. While we all take pride in our physical, intellectual and moral virtues; most of us instinctively recognize that the presence of those virtues in us has little to do with anything we have done ourselves. We might build upon some of the virtues present in us to cultivate additional virtues. But the foundation of it all trails off into places far outside our own finite existences. Everything you are - your genetic inheritance, your moral qualities and virtues and your acquired excellences comes ultimately from places far outside of you, and a person is just a highly contingent and impermanent node in an imponderable causal nexus.

I know this is all very philosophical, and in the end it doesn't do much to resolve the practical disagreements about how we should set up the institutions of our society. But thinking about these truths does help to counter certain obsessively individualistic habits of thought, such as the voice that says, "That's mine, and they are taking it from me," or the one that says, "I am responsible for this; not anybody or anything else."

Recognizing the overriding value of the gifts we have received can help us cultivate an attitude of humility, gratitude and peaceful resignation. In religious traditions, this attitude is sometimes called "spiritual poverty", and I think it is something American society in its modern form could probably use a bit more of.

I’ll put that down as a maybe. That’s a fair answer.

I think the argument that those who enjoy economic success today are building on those who have gone before is of course true but a different argument than whether those participating in the economy are earning their success. Bill Gates did not have to grow his own food so he had time to figure out how to take advantage of the emerging personal computer market. Of course someone else had to develop the semiconductor industry which enabled the personal computer. All of that does not detract from the debate as to whether Bill Gates advanced the economy enough to justify his wealth. I happen to think that he probably did not, but he is really an outlier.

I think one can “rightfully claim” to have earned their wealth if they have contributed to the economy approximately what they have received from it. That’s the libertarian streak in me that you clearly despise.

Of course there is some validity to "supply side" stimulus, where appropriate, in specific cases. Going back to Keynesian economics it's recognized there are appropriate places for government to spur economic growth, not just to maintain employment, but also to spur innovation and infrastructure.

But that's more of an investment, which of course has to be weighed as you would any investment, on an individual basis. A great example is the S Korean partnership with telcoms to invest in, and heavilly regulate, accelerated internet deployment which quickly leap-frogged the US. They got a great net, telcoms got rich, the tech market grew as a result of supply, and the economy grew and there was wealth dispersion.

However, supply-side as an ideology presuming that happens automatically due to an invisible hand, is simply "voodoo economics" as HW Bush once rightly criticized, before he got the memo. What laisse faire types hate is that good Supply Side should actually be seen as a government investment, and come with responsibilities and partnership.

Which gets down to the real motivation behind Supply Side, Laissez Faire, Pareto's Law, and so on.

It's essentially Social Darwinism by many other names. These people have the economic equivalent of Asperger's Syndrome.

It's not as simple as individual meritocracy, and therefore progressive taxation is robbery, which seems to be your gist.

Our Egalitarian system gives opportunities to everyone. Opportunities that no individual, not even the most wealthy, could individually buy in advance. You can pay down Western Civilization on an individual account.

There are ethical, actually logistical, reasons for Egalitarianism as opposed to Social Darwinism. If we could be guaranteed that Bill Gates' or Steve Job's offspring would also be the best, or that there wasn't someone more capable who never got the chance due to circumstance, then there would be no problem with nepotism and plutocracy, or even monarchy.

Reality demands policies that maintain egalitarianism. Ranging from anti-trust regulation to estate taxes, to avoid nepotism and plutocracy, which are antithetical to democracy. And democracy, despite flaws, is the most efficient system at generating happiness and progress, and thereby the most ethical.

Meritocracy should be incentivized in conjunction with egalitarianism. They must be balanced. A more perfect society will be found in the subtle shades of gray, not some stark contrast, as romantic as that would be.

Communism is a simplistic ideology which seeks egalitarian efficiency but soon collapses by failing to promote meritocracy and by actually generating an excessive ruling bureaucracy leading to extreme dissonance and eventually totalitarianism. Libertarianism is s simplistic ideology which seeks to promote maximum meritocracy but soon collapses as it fails to promote egalitarianism which then leads to nepotism, plutocracy, dissonance, stagnation, and totalitarian despots.

Bill Gates would still be the wealthiest man alive, and have incentive, even if he had paid a higher rate. As it is he doesn't know what to do with the wealth he has. And he's far from the worst example. Oil men, money lenders, and such who tend to border on rent activities are far worse.

Even if a person goes entirely to private schools and comes from the wealthiest of families, they will owe a great deal to the general populace and rule of law. Eventually, should they become successful in business, their consumers will only exist as a result of social policies and rule of law.

Without public schools for example, Bill Gates would have nobody to sell computers to, and might simply die a violent death due to crime if it wasn't for the rule of law, which depends upon an educated and idealistic populace.

Bill Gates and others are obligated to repay that system to maintain those opportunities for others. Not loot the system for personal gain and then let it decay.

You seem to think that's ripping off the wealthy. Actually, it's repaying society and giving back so others will have the same and hopefully greater opportunities. Paying back society and having some gratitude.

And no, I don't think optional philanthropy cuts it or even close. Bill Gates is givign back, though it's questionable whether he should have accumulated so much wealth relative to his contribution to begin with, and whether he wasn't just the beneficiary of economically deficient patent laws and anti-competitive practices. But at least he's giving back, which is better than most. Most just build monuments to themselves like Pharaohs.

It's ethically lacking because it's unreliable, inefficient, and deficient. It's also plutocratic and undemocratic.

Government should be more efficient. But the anti-government ideology isn't helping. It's a delusion. It's apathy which fails to address the problems and fails to stimulate real reform. We'll not get a better state through Libertarianism any more than Russia or China got a better government through revolt and communism. They just flipped from one extreme to another and wound up with the exact same problems.

We need to optimize government which is going to be difficult and not very pretty. Not daydream auto-magical ideological delusions.