The 1 Percent Are Only Half the Problem - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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inequality divergence social class income union
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Since 1979, the one-percenters have doubled their share of the nation’s collective income from about 10 percent to about 20 percent.
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And between 2009, when the Great Recession ended, and 2011, the one-percenters saw their average income rise by 11 percent even as the 99-percenters saw theirs fall slightly
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This dismal litany invites the conclusion that if we would just put a tight enough choke chain on the 1 percent, then we’d solve the problem of income inequality. But alas, that isn’t true, because it wouldn’t address the other half of the story: the rise of the educated class.
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Conceiving of inequality as something caused by the very richest people has obvious political appeal, especially since (by definition) nearly all of us belong to the 99 percent.
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On those rare occasions when conservatives do bring it up, it’s the skills-based gap that usually draws their attention, because it offers an opportunity to criticize our government-run system of public education and especially teachers’ unions.
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Liberals resist talking about the skills-based gap because they don’t want to tell the working classes that they’re losing ground because they didn’t study hard enough. Liberals prefer to focus on the 1 percent-based gap.
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There’s also a pleasing simplicity to the causes of the growing gap between the 1 and the 99. There are only two, and both are familiar liberal targets: the rise of a deregulated financial sector and the erosion of accountability in compensating top executives outside finance
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One reason the left plays down the growing skills-based gap is that it accepts at face value the conservative claim that educational failure is its root cause.
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both represent a dramatic reversal of economic trends that prevailed in the United States for most of the 20th century. From the 1930s through the 1970s the 1 percent saw its share of national income decline, while the “college premium” either fell or followed no clear up-or-down pattern over time.
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At least some of the tools to restore these more egalitarian trends shouldn’t be divisive ideologically. Liberals and conservatives both recognize the benefits of preschool education,
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Another reform both conservatives and liberals have supported — though at different times — is withholding federal aid from colleges and universities that can’t control tuition increases
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THERE is also more bipartisan support than you might suppose for restricting some of the Wall Street excesses that enrich the 1 percent.
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a growing chorus of conservative voices, including the columnist George F. Will, the former Utah governor Jon M. Huntsman Jr. and Richard W. Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, favor breaking up the big banks.
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Since 1979 the income gap between people with college or graduate degrees and people whose education ended in high school has grown. Broadly speaking, this is a gap between working-class families in the middle 20 percent (with incomes roughly between $39,000 and $62,000) and affluent-to-rich families (say, the top 10 percent, with incomes exceeding $111,000)
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But the decline of labor unions is just as important. At one time union membership was highly effective at reducing or eliminating the wage gap between college and high school graduates. That’s much less true today
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Only about 7 percent of the private-sector labor force is covered by union contracts, about the same proportion as before the New Deal. Six decades ago it was nearly 40 percent.
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Although conservatives often insist that the 1 percent’s richesse doesn’t come out of the pockets of the 99 percent, that assertion ignores the fact that labor’s share of gross domestic product is shrinking while capital’s share is growing
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the G.D.P. shift from labor to capital explains fully one-third of the 1 percent’s run-up in its share of national income.