The Widening Rich-Poor Gap

[Bronco_Beerslug]

Our ever increasing service dominated economy is not good news for Americans and their children!

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Rich-poor gap gaining attention
A remark by Greenspan symbolizes concern that wealth disparities may destabilize the economy.
By Peter Grier | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON – The income gap between the rich and the rest of the US population has become so wide, and is growing so fast, that it might eventually threaten the stability of democratic capitalism itself.

Is that a liberal's talking point? Sure. But it's also a line from the recent public testimony of a champion of the free market: Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

America's powerful central banker hasn't suddenly lurched to the left of Democratic National Committee chief Howard Dean. His solution is better education today to create a flexible workforce for tomorrow - not confiscation of plutocrats' yachts.

But the fact that Mr. Greenspan speaks about this topic at all may show how much the growing concentration of national wealth at the top, combined with the uncertainties of increased globalization, worries economic policymakers as they peer into the future.

"He is the conventional wisdom," says Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. "When I'm arguing with people, I say, 'Even Alan Greenspan....' "

Greenspan's comments at a Joint Economic Committee hearing last week were typical, for him. Asked a leading question by Sen. Jack Reed (D) of Rhode Island, he agreed that over the past two quarters hourly wages have shown few signs of accelerating. Overall employee compensation has gone up - but mostly due to a surge in bonuses and stock-option exercises.

The Fed chief than added that the 80 percent of the workforce represented by nonsupervisory workers has recently seen little, if any, income growth at all. The top 20 percent of supervisory, salaried, and other workers has.

The result of this, said Greenspan, is that the US now has a significant divergence in the fortunes of different groups in its labor market. "As I've often said, this is not the type of thing which a democratic society - a capitalist democratic society - can really accept without addressing," Greenspan told the congressional hearing.

The cause of this problem? Education, according to Greenspan. Specifically, high school education. US children test above world average levels at the 4th grade level, he noted. By the 12th grade, they do not. "We have to do something to prevent that from happening," said Greenspan.

So are liberals overjoyed by these words from a man who is the high priest of capitalism? Not really, or at least not entirely.

For one thing, some liberal analysts prefer to focus on the very tip of the income scale, not the top 20 percent. Recent Congressional Budget Office data show that the top 1 percent of the population received 11.4 percent of national after-tax income in 2002, points out Isaac Shapiro of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in a new study. That's up from a 7.5 percent share in 1979.

By contrast, the middle fifth of the population saw its share of national after-tax income fall over that same period of time, from 16.5 to 15.8. "Income is now more concentrated at the very top of the income spectrum than in all but six years since the mid-1930s," asserts Mr. Shapiro in his report.

For another, some Democratic analysts believe that Greenspan's emphasis on education as a cure ignores other causal factors of inequity. Data show an income gap widening among college graduates, says Mr. Bernstein. The quality of US high schools has nothing to do with that, he says. Instead it's partly a function of overall monetary and fiscal policies. "Greenspan takes a very long term view of the situation," says Bernstein.

On the other hand, some conservatives label the whole inequality debate a myth. The media's recent focus on the subject stems from its liberal bias and clever press management by Democrats, they say.

Inequality studies often ignore the wealth created by rising house prices, for instance - and homes represent the most substantial investment by many, if not most, Americans.

Nor do US workers necessarily perceive themselves on the losing end of a rigged capitalist game. A recent New York Times survey found that while 44 percent of respondents said they had a working-class childhood, only 35 percent said they were working class today, points out Bruce Bartlett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. Eighteen percent said they grew up lower class, while only 7 percent said they remained in that societal segment.

When Democrats today raise the inequality flag, they are simply trying to attack President Bush's tax cuts, albeit indirectly, says Mr. Bartlett. "A lot of this is driven by the estate-tax debate," he says.

And as Greenspan himself points out, by many measures the economy is doing well. Unemployment is down, GDP is up. Inflation still slumbers. Current standards of living are unmatched.

"So you can look at the system and say it's got a lot of problems to it, and sure it does. It always has," Greenspan told the JEC last week. "But you can't get around the fact that this is the most extraordinarily successful economy in history."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0614/p01s03-usec.html

[clarker]

Nor do US workers necessarily perceive themselves on the losing end of a rigged capitalist game. A recent New York Times survey found that while 44 percent of respondents said they had a working-class childhood, only 35 percent said they were working class today, points out Bruce Bartlett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. Eighteen percent said they grew up lower class, while only 7 percent said they remained in that societal segment.

[clarker]

And as Greenspan himself points out, by many measures the economy is doing well. Unemployment is down, GDP is up. Inflation still slumbers. Current standards of living are unmatched.

"So you can look at the system and say it's got a lot of problems to it, and sure it does. It always has," Greenspan told the JEC last week. "But you can't get around the fact that this is the most extraordinarily successful economy in history."

[Bronco_Beerslug]

And as Greenspan himself points out, by many measures the economy is doing well. Unemployment is down, GDP is up. Inflation still slumbers. Current standards of living are unmatched.

"So you can look at the system and say it's got a lot of problems to it, and sure it does. It always has," Greenspan told the JEC last week. "But you can't get around the fact that this is the most extraordinarily successful economy in history."
It has been, when we were a manufacturing economy, not any more. Record poverty and 50 million without health insurance show that all to well. Also, the little fact of all-time record deficits and the selling of the American dollar to foreigners.

[clarker]

It has been, when we were a manufacturing economy, not any more. Record poverty and 50 million without health insurance show that all to well. Also, the little fact of all-time record deficits and the selling of the American dollar to foreigners.Hey, that is not me talking, it came from the story you posted.

[W*GS]

More gloom-and-doom-ism from the usual suspects.

Funny thing is, the same widening gap has been occurring elsewhere - most all European countries, for example. And they have nationalized health care and strong worker "protection" schemes in place.

It stands to reason, then, that American-style capitalism isn't at fault, much as the Left would like to believe.

[W*GS]

The politics of envy
May 6th 1999
From The Economist print edition

[b]Too much inequality is bad for you[b]

“IMAGINE”, Martin Feldstein, a Harvard University economist, told a conference audience last year, “that as you leave here today, a small magic bird appears and gives each of you $1,000. We would all think that is a good thing. And yet the nation’s gini coefficient [a measure of inequality] would rise.”

American skies seem full of the flutterings of magic birds. The poor are no longer growing poorer, and the rich are growing immensely richer. The beating of those charmed wings can be heard in some other countries, too. As economies are opened and regulations relaxed, companies often find that their pay policies start to head in the same direction as America’s. In Japan, for instance, where deregulation has swept through the paper-pushing finance industry, it has created a dire shortage of people who understand markets rather than management. As a result, no bright spark at a foreign investment bank will now move for a place on a seniority-based ladder. In Argentina, President Carlos Menem’s high-speed liberalisation has transformed the market for managers with equal rapidity. Privatised companies, explains Roberto Martinez of Hay Group in Argentina, are frantically recruiting from the handful of multinationals in the country: IBM, B.A.T Industries, Philip Morris. New foreign investors are adding to the pressure. Companies are scouring Chile and Mexico for talent—and coming up against Chilean and sometimes Brazilian firms engaged in the same hunt, pushing up top-management pay.

Yet not everybody welcomes the money bird, even in America. Mr Crystal, pay consultant turned critic, recalls: “Plato told Aristotle that no one should have more than five times the wealth of the lowest-paid member of society. The ratios of today would totally blow Plato away. Last year, the pay of a big-company chief executive was 350 times that of the average worker. In 2010, I project the gap will be that between Louis XVI and his workers—and you know what happened to Louis XVI.”

America’s unions are also restive: a website run by the AFL/CIO allows envious workers to tap in their pay package to discover what sort of multiple of their own wages their boss is paid. Cheekily, it asks workers whether they enjoy perks such as free country-club membership or a chauffeured car.

Such sniping is mild compared with the attacks on wealth in the America of the 1890s, when 1% of American households probably owned 45% of the national wealth. Then, Americans fretted not just that the country was becoming as class-ridden as Europe, but that it was being overrun by anarchists. Today, Americans seem far more willing to tolerate inequality than people in most rich countries. “In the United States”, reflects Mr Monks, “nobody minds Bill Gates making $49 billion. He is an American hero. There’s no sense of the virtue of a homogenous culture.”

Elsewhere, there is often great reluctance to believe that people are—or should be—motivated much by money. “Britain”, says Hermes’s Mr Ross Goobey, “is a smaller, more enclosed society than America, and people still work for position, status, to be part of the great and the good.” Countries, like companies, will remain free to engineer greater or lesser degrees of equality. But there will be a price—as Sweden is discovering, and as Germany has already noticed. As the market for top talent grows more international, so it may force greater tolerance for inequality on countries that have spent half a century trying to root it out.

Even within countries, the trend towards unequal rewards puts pressure on employers who cannot be flexible. That in turn may have powerful effects. Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard University, complained in a book published in 1993 that the brightest young students were no longer choosing medicine or the social sciences, let alone academic life: they were going into business. “The entire country has an interest in whether earnings are above what is needed to attract and motivate corporate leaders,” he said. The distribution of income affected social justice, public confidence in the economic system and “even the balance of political power and influence in the nation.”

Certainly, clever youngsters have noticed where the big money is. “My students are going into investment banks, consultancies and small companies they start themselves,” reports Harvard Business School’s Mr Hall. Big companies, whose bosses get the most publicity for their pay packets, are having to compete more fiercely for the brightest young. And not just in America: in Germany, where the long years of low birth rates will reduce the size of the pool over the coming decade, Kienbaum, the country’s leading pay consultancy, recently set up a special unit to comb academe for youthful high-fliers. Swiss firms, already short of bright recruits, are stepping up their efforts to lure young Germans, many of whom say they want to work abroad.

After years when many young people scorned private enterprise and chose professional and public-service careers instead, it is surely a good thing that more of them should plump for jobs that contribute directly to economic growth. But for the public sector everywhere, it is ominous. Government—especially federal government—service is the only part of the American job market where inequality has not increased. “Two things happen,” says Harvard’s Mr Katz. “You get huge queues of people for low-level jobs, creating a great incentive to save money by outsourcing. And you can’t recruit talented people at the top, so you have to hire consultants.” A study in Britain by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that public-sector pay was significantly less unequal than private; and that the one group of workers who were paid less in the public sector than the private were men with university degrees (see chart 8).

Why do governments systematically underpay their top people? One reason is a tendency to think in terms of quantity, not quality. “Governments can set low pay and still get workers,” says Andrew Oswald, an economist at Warwick University. “It is the quality that will adjust. I doubt whether western democracies have fully grasped this. Governments still tend to count the warm bodies applying for occupations.” But public-sector workers often resist the trend towards more unequal rewards that is evident in the rest of the economy. Most countries’ public sectors have failed to relate pay to performance. Work by the OECD shows that there has been no increase in pay dispersion for senior civil servants. Attempts to introduce performance-related pay are fought off by staff who argue that their output is not only hard to measure but also collegiate, so that any rewards should go to the team, not the individual.

Some hope to change these attitudes. In America, the Edison Project, which manages state schools for profit (and plans to come to market next year), has been developing a plan to give stock options to teachers. And at the University of Pittsburgh, the Katz Business School recently gave its 160 staff options to buy 80 phantom shares in Katz Inc, an imaginary company whose share “price” will move in line with 15 indicators of the school’s performance, such as the average starting salary of its graduates. Staff who perform well will be given extra options, and employees will be able to redeem their options from next year.

Such experiments, though, are always likely to be limited. If public employers cannot find ways to single out their best people for special rewards, then they may find their only choice is to turn over those people’s tasks to the private sector. So the battle for top talent will help to reduce state employment.

Teams and talents

For companies, the biggest danger in the trend towards rewarding individual talent may be that it penalises those who do best in teams. And the greatest risk in increasing the gap between senior managers and the rest may be that the infantry will become cynical and demotivated.

One survey of academics at more than 300 American universities found that the greater the pay dispersion, the smaller the output of collaborative research. Recent work by Charles O’Reilly of Stanford University Business School suggests that widely dispersed management pay goes with higher levels of turnover. Where organisations need people to work together, too much inequality is dangerous. Companies cannot afford to demoralise their middle managers—the people who so often build and run a company’s teams—by paying too much for individual performance.

John Hicks, a British economist, made this point back in 1963, in an appendix to his seminal “Theory of Wages”. He pointed out that the labour market was unlike other markets in that it had social as well as economic aspects: “The purely economic correspondence between the wage paid to a particular worker and his value to the employer is not a sufficient condition of efficiency; it is also necessary that there should not be strong feelings of injustice about the relative treatment of different employees, since these would diminish the efficiency of the team.”

Employers need to make sure that, in rewarding the best individuals fairly, they do not undermine teamwork and collaboration. That is a delicate balance. It will be easier to achieve where the rewards that go to individuals are generally seen to be deserved. This is equally true of pay for chief executives. Where a talented boss builds a company that flourishes, few are likely to begrudge paying him a fortune. When senior people are rewarded for mediocrity, mutinous feelings of injustice may cause people to work less hard.

Inequality, within companies and countries, is most likely to be tolerated if it goes with a sense of equal opportunity. Because people are endowed with unequal quantities of human capital, the trend towards greater inequality of pay is here to stay. But societies need to use education and training to try to ensure that everyone has an equal chance to make the most of that endowment. It can be done. In a recent comparison of the labour markets of the United States and Canada over the past two decades, Paul Romer of Stanford University and two colleagues found that pay inequality north of the border had widened much less than south. They explain the difference with Canada’s superior education policies. Just as the spread of high-school education in the first quarter of this century halted the advancing inequality of its early years, so better education, especially for the less well-off, may now be the best way to narrow the gap.


Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Record poverty and 50 million without health insurance show that all to well. Also, the little fact of all-time record deficits and the selling of the American dollar to foreigners.

Bingo.

[Spider]

I blame credit cards , well credit in general .......If you cant afford somthing dont worry we will sell it to you on payments with a charge of an intrest rate ........
Dont have cash , whip out the ole Charge card , we will pay and charge you an intrest rate , no worries .........
Buying a House ? sure we will do it on payments , 30 year loan with intrest of course .....
People have been allowed to out live their means ...... if you dont have the cash on hand , you cant afford it .....Work and save ....... tried and true method ....

[Tom H.]

Credit cards can be a 500lb gorilla.

I use credit all the time but pay it off every month. Every little bit.
I'm fortunate in that I have my home loan from family which is a great alternative since the interest goes to my in-laws instead of a bank. They charge the lowest intrest allowable wich is also a bonus. I think I pay about as much as some apartment renters in my area for a 2800 sq ft house.

With that said I was once in debt $8000 on credit and had to work my tail off to bring it to $0. Stay lean and mean and like Spide said, "Work and save"

In my industry the people that do well don't devalue their work. If you work for pennies then people will expect you to always be cheap.

[Spider]

In my industry the people that do well don't devalue their work. If you work for pennies then people will expect you to always be cheap.
well said ........

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Bush's empathy squeeze

Let's consider our political moment through a story. Suppose a chauffeur drives a sleek limousine through the streets of New York, a millionaire in the back seat. Through the window, the millionaire spots a homeless woman and her two children huddling in the cold, sharing a loaf of bread. He orders the chauffeur to stop the car. The chauffeur opens the passenger door for the millionaire, who walks over to the mother and snatches the loaf. He slips back into the car and they drive on, leaving behind an even poorer family and a baffled crowd of sidewalk witnesses. For his part, the chauffeur feels real qualms about what his master has done, because unlike his employer, he has recently known hard times himself. But he drives on nonetheless. Let's call this the Chauffeur's Dilemma.

Absurd as it seems, we are actually witnessing this scene right now. At first blush, we might imagine that this story exaggerates our situation, but let us take a moment to count the loaves of bread that have recently changed hands and those that soon will. Then, let's ask why so many people are letting this happen.

* On average, the 2003 tax cut has already given $93,500 to every millionaire. It is estimated that 52 percent of the benefits of George W. Bush's 2001-03 tax cuts have enriched the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans (those with an average annual income of $1,491,000).

* On average, the 2003 tax cut gave $217 to every middle-income person. By 2010, it is estimated that just 1 percent of the benefits of the tax cut will go to the bottom 20 percent of Americans (those with an average annual income of $12,200).

* During at least one year since 2000, 82 of the largest American corporations—including General Motors, El Paso Energy, and, before the scandal broke, Enron—paid no income tax.

In the meantime, the poor are being bled. Long-term unemployment has risen while the Bush administration has cut long-term unemployment benefits. Most American cities are looking at 15 percent cuts in already bare-boned budgets, which will close more libraries, cancel more after-school and English As A Second Language programs, and limit access to health clinics.

Proposed budget cuts beginning in 2006 are threatening the funding given to low-income programs. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, with these cuts in place, low-income programs will be significantly reduced over the next five years. By 2010, elementary and secondary education funding will be cut by $4.6 billion, or 12 percent; 670,000 fewer women and children will receive assistance through the Women, Infants, and Children Supplemental Nutrition Program; Head Start, which currently serves about 906,000 children, will serve 100,000 fewer children; and 370,000 fewer low-income families, elderly people and people with disabilities will receive rental assistance with rental vouchers. Bush proposes to cut housing and community-development aid by more than 30 percent in 2006 alone.

It's not hard to understand why the millionaire, with the power to satisfy so many desires, might want to claim another's bread. But why does the chauffeur open the door? Why do about half of lower- and middle-income Americans approve of tax cuts that favor the rich and budget cuts that deprive the poor?

We often hear two explanations for this. First, George W. Bush has deflected public attention from the bread transfer at home to political enemies abroad. Second, Americans have been repeatedly told over the last three decades that the government—military spending aside—is grossly wasteful and hopelessly inefficient. So why not pocket a little money yourself, no matter who gets the lion's share, if it's being wasted anyway?

But, by itself, can anti-government propaganda—added to war fever—explain why so many Americans are rolling over in the face of such an extraordinary transfer from poor to rich? Most Americans used to believe, after all, that the government could help people achieve the American dream. In 1970, when America had far fewer homeless children and millionaires, it helped people more and taxpayers begrudged it less. Most people were proud that the United States was a middle-class society, without much in the way of an overclass or an underclass. They credited their government for fostering this ideal. Many Christians among them thought taxes on the rich and programs for the poor expressed a vital Christian ideal: sharing.

But three things have changed since 1970: attitudes toward governmental redistribution, economic times and the shape of empathy. Attitudes toward redistribution are different—even among those who would stand to benefit the most. When asked in a 2003 Hart and Teeter poll, "Do you think this (Bush) tax plan benefits mainly the rich or benefits everyone?" 56 percent of blue-collar men (those without a college degree) who answered "Yes" (the plan favors the rich) still favored the plan. For blue-collar men living on annual family incomes of $30,000 or less, half supported it. Apart from the super-rich, who overwhelmingly vote Republican, an interesting pattern emerges: Even many of those with a fragile grip on the American dream go along with taking bread from the poor and giving it to the rich.

What is being forged, then, is a strange, covert moral deal between the millionaire and the hard-pressed chauffeur, sealed by the right-wing church. It is a deal that says, in essence, "Let's ignore the needy at home, exacerbate the class divide, wage war after war abroad, and sustain the idea that all this is morally good."

The Empathy Squeeze

What is happening in the heart of the chauffeur? He has himself known hard times, and is as capable as anyone else of compassion. What about his circumstances, his religious beliefs and Bush's manipulation of these might lead him to harden his heart?

For some time now, many families have felt squeezed between high hopes and declining prospects. Most Americans strongly believe in working hard and moving up the ladder of success. They "identify up" with people more rich, famous and lucky than they, rather than "identifying down" with people more poor, obscure and unlucky. However underpaid, our chauffeur dreams of becoming a millionaire more than he dreads lying homeless in the street. If others can rise to the top, he figures, why can't he?

And in decades past, he had good reason to aim high. For every decade in the 150 years before 1970—including the decade of the Great Depression—real earnings rose. As University of Massachusetts economist Rick Wolff points out, however tough a man's job or long his hours, he could usually look forward to a bigger paycheck.

But after 1970, the real earning power of male wages—and I focus here on men, for they are the closer fit to the profile of the chauffeur—stopped rising. Their dream was linked, it turned out, to jobs in an industrial sector that been automated out or outsourced abroad. Their old union-protected, high-wage, blue-collar jobs began to disappear as new nonunion, low-wage, service-sector jobs appeared. Indeed, the man with a high-school diploma or a few years of college found few new high-opportunity jobs in the much-touted new economy while the vast majority ended up in low-opportunity jobs near the bottom. As jobs in the middle have become harder to find, his earning power has fallen, his benefits have shrunk and his job security has been reduced.

As a result, Wolff argues, two things happened. First, life at home became tougher. Wives took paid jobs—and this in a society that had given little thought to paid parental leave or family-friendly policies. For men as well as women, hours of work have increased. From 1973 to 1996, average hours per worker went up 19 percent. Since the 1970s, increases have occurred in involuntary job loss, in work absences due to illness or disability, and in debt and bankruptcy. The proportion of single mother families rose from 12 percent in 1970 to 26 percent in 2003.

Tougher times have led, in turn, to an "empathy squeeze." That is, many people responded to this crisis by withdrawing into their own communities, their own families, themselves. If a man gets fired or demoted, if he can't make his house payments, if his wife is leaving him, or if his son is failing in school, he feels like he's got enough on his hands. He can't afford to feel sorry for so many other people. He's trying to be a good father, a helpful neighbor, and friend to people he knows who themselves need more help. He localizes empathy. He narrows his circle of empathy in a way that coincides with George W. Bush's hourglass America. Pay a tax to help a homeless mother in another city? Forget it. Charity begins at home.

Despite this, many people who voted for Bush may feel real qualms about the homeless mother and her hungry children. They experience the chauffeur's dilemma. In his heart of hearts, the chauffeur feels bad that he has put such space between himself and the homeless woman's plight. If he goes to a Christian church, he wants to be a good, giving, sharing Christian.

And here is where Bush and his social-issues team make a stealthy empathy grab. How? They "privatize" the chauffeur's morality, and in two ways. They do it first by redefining "good" as a matter not of giving or of sharing but of judging. The chauffeur is offered the chance to feel good by disapproving of homosexuals and of economic failures while quietly setting aside the idea of helping the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill and the unemployed. Second and more importantly, Bush proposes the idea of giving through private, religious channels and thus offers moral cover for the idea of giving less. We will stop giving to the less fortunate as citizens through our government and start giving as parishioners through our churches. But, quite apart from this as a bid to expand the fold, it is a way of offering a moral free pass to the act of replacing a lake with a drop of water.

Rather than fixing the problems that make people anxious, Bush takes advantage of the very feelings of anxiety, frustration and fear that insecurity creates—and that his policies exacerbate—while deflecting hopes away from government help. He makes life quietly harder at home while pointing a finger of blame at one enemy after another abroad. He is, I think, deregulating American capitalism with one hand while regulating the resulting anxiety with the other. And to do this, he has enlisted powerful allies on the corporate and religious right.

The Chauffeur And The Rapture

This leads me to a second effect of economic distress that Wolff notes: rising membership in nontraditional Protestant churches. Among these are some churches that promote the belief that the world is coming to an end, and that, following this, Christians will ascend to heaven in a Rapture while all others will suffer in hell. Those who hold to these beliefs are not a minor group. According to a recent Gallup Poll, 36 percent of Americans believe that the world is coming to an end. The 12-volume Left Behind series of Christian novels has sold more than 62 million copies.

We can understand the appeal of the idea of a Rapture, though not, or not only, in the believer's terms. There is a world literally coming to an end—the industrial world of the well-paid blue-collar worker. It is a world to which the workingman and woman have already sacrificed much time and from which the promised rewards are disappearing. Belief in the Rapture provides, I would speculate, an escape from real anxiety over this very great earthly loss. Internet images of the Rapture often portray thin, well-dressed white people rising up into heaven to join awaiting others. The excluded are welcomed. The rejected are accepted. The downwardly mobile become upwardly mobile. The Rapture creates a celestial split between haves and have-nots, with no one in the middle. And in this vision, those caught in a social class squeeze are at last securely on top. The Rapture absorbs the sting of being hardworking losers in the harsh and rigged winner's culture of the radical right.

In a just society, of course, there need be no permanent economic losers. It is well within the capacity of a wisely led American government to restore a living wage to every worker. The power of the people once pointed in that direction. Popular uprisings in the 1930s led to massive demonstrations, strikes and eventually Works Progress Administration projects, unemployment insurance and our Social Security system.

But today's impulse to protest goes into blockading abortion clinics and writing Darwin out of school textbooks. The inner-city homeless, children in overcrowded public schools, unemployed in need of job retraining, and the 18 percent of American children who don't get enough to eat each day become part of the glimpsed world the chauffeur passes by, and his church can only do so much for them.

Like many others, I felt moved by the Christians who knelt in prayer for the family of the late Terri Schiavo, the comatose patient on life support in Florida. But it made me wonder why we don't see similar vigils drawing attention to near-comatose victims of winter living on city sidewalks. They've been taken off life support, too.

The chauffeur knows this and wants to do the moral thing. But he's worse off himself. He feels he has less to give. Bush offers him a way to feel good about giving less—make a general ethic of giving less. He can downsize his conscience and still feel good. This deal, first struck between right-wing anti-tax interests and evangelicals back in the 1970s, offers a way to satisfy the chauffeur's better angel while getting his OK to take the bread. If right-wing ministers have talked our chauffeur into believing in the Rapture, this belief, too, can become just another reason to drive on.

In a sense, Bush is exploiting the common man twice over—once by ignoring his own plight and that of the poor and twice by covering it over with military drums and tin-man morality. We really need to turn both things around. But to do that, we need to remind the chauffeur, wherever he is, that it's within his power to stop the car—tax the millionaire, help the homeless and offer new hope to those in between. Otherwise, the deal Bush is brokering between millionaire and chauffeur will impoverish the chauffeur—in his pocketbook and in his soul.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050623/bushs_empathy_squeeze.php

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Expensive Favor: "I cannot think of any instance in which the federal government has been willing to spend $1 billion a week and 1,700 lives just to improve conditions in any one of the 50 states. Yet that is exactly what it is doing in Iraq" 6/25

http://www.antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=6434

During the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush argued against nation building and foreign military entanglements. In the second presidential debate, he said: "I'm not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, 'This is the way it's got to be.'"

From 2000 debate with Al Gore:

"We can't be all things to all people in the world, Jim, and I think that's where the vice president and I are going to have some differences," Bush told moderator Jim Lehrer. Bush talked at length about the use of the military, saying the Clinton-Gore administration had engaged in "nation-building" military excursions and had overextended the military. (Oh, the irony!)

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/10/11/debate.wrap/

Bush on Troop Deployment, Nation Building

Campaign 2000: "If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road."
Campaign 2000: "I'm worried about an opponent who uses nation-building and the military in the same sentence. See, our view of the military is for our military to be properly prepared to fight and win war and, therefore, prevent war from happening in the first place." [6 Nov 2000]
Sept 2002:"The American people know my position. And that is that regime change [in Iraq] is in the interest of the world." [CNN]
Oct 2002: A senior administration official said, "The administration, with its international partners, is doing something akin to nation-building... "Secretary of State Colin L. Powell confirmed...that Bush was considering, among other options, installing a U.S.-led occupation government if Hussein's regime is removed." [Baltimore Sun]
Mar 2003: "We will be changing the regime of Iraq, for the good of the Iraqi people."

http://uspolitics.about.com/od/campaign2004/a/bush_promises_4.htm