Political policies have turned America into 'Richistan'

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Democrats have largely been bystanders, or even part of the problem. Liberals' shift to "post-material" and lifestyle issues has marooned the working and middle classes.

By Anthony B. Robinson

A new book, Winner-Take-All Politics (Simon and Shuster), by political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, tells an important story at once familiar and unfamiliar. They shed useful light on the familiar part, which is that over the past 30 years wealth and income inequality in the U. S. have grown — dramatically.

Since the late 1970s the wealthiest 1 percent of the nation’'s population has pocketed more than 35 percent of the real national income growth, which is more than the bottom 90 percent of the population combined. Or to look at from a different angle, between 1979 and 2006, the bottom 20 percent of the population had real income growth of .3 percent, the middle 20 percent real income growth of .7 percent, while the top 1 percent enjoyed real income growth of an astonishing 260 percent.

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That's the relatively familiar part of the story. The less familiar narrative is how this happened. Authors Hacker and Pierson trace the story of a “Thirty Years War,” that began in the Carter years, when the capital gains tax was slashed, payroll taxes raised, and unions crippled. They argue that this enormous shift in wealth is not the result of usual suspects, economic globalization or technological change that makes knowledge workers and the highly educated wealthy. Nor is it the consequence of the "unfettered market" taking its natural course. Rather, it is the result of government policy, that is, of politics. Politics and resulting policy has tilted the playing field in favor of the wealthy and the super-wealthy, the latter being the top one-tenth of the top 1 percent of the population.

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A subplot of particular relevance is what Hacker and Pierson describe as the shifting of liberalism away from the traditional "bread-and-butter" focus of older groups such as organized labor, to the social concerns of the more affluent — abortion rights, women's rights, environmentalism, and civil liberties. Advocacy groups for all these issues proliferated in this 30-year period. “And yet, they almost never focused their attention on the economic issues that most powerfully affected the working and middle classes," the authors write. "The result was a boon for the post-materialist causes of more affluent liberals, but it left traditional material causes with only a handful of energetic backers.”

http://crosscut.com/2010/11/24/politics-government/20391/Political-policies-have-turned-America-into--Richistan-/