Replies to post #33712 on Politics and Money

[StephanieVanbryce]

Putting Millionaires Before Jobs

Editorial November 3, 2011

There’s nothing partisan about a road or a bridge or an airport; Democrats and Republicans have voted to spend billions on them for decades and long supported rebuilding plans in their own states. On Thursday, though, when President Obama’s plan to spend $60 billion on infrastructure repairs came up for a vote in the Senate, not a single Republican agreed to break the party’s filibuster.

That’s because the bill would pay for itself with a 0.7 percent surtax on people making more than $1 million. That would affect about 345,000 taxpayers, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, adding an average of $13,457 to their annual tax bills. Protecting that elite group — and hewing to their rigid antitax vows — was more important to Senate Republicans than the thousands of construction jobs the bill would have helped create, or the millions of people who would have used the rebuilt roads, bridges and airports.

Senate Republicans filibustered the president’s full jobs act last month for the same reasons. And they have vowed to block the individual pieces of that bill that Democrats are now bringing to the floor. Senate Democrats have also accused them of opposing any good idea that might put people back to work and rev the economy a bit before next year’s presidential election.

There is no question that the infrastructure bill would be good for the flagging economy — and good for the country’s future development. It would directly spend $50 billion on roads, bridges, airports and mass transit systems, and it would then provide another $10 billion to an infrastructure bank to encourage private-sector investment in big public works projects.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican of Texas, co-sponsored an infrastructure-bank bill in March, and other Republicans have supported similar efforts over the years. But the Republicans’ determination to stick to an antitax pledge clearly trumps even their own good ideas.

A competing Republican bill, which also failed on Thursday, was cobbled together in an attempt to make it appear as if the party has equally valid ideas on job creation and rebuilding. It would have extended the existing highway and public transportation financing for two years, paying for it with a $40 billion cut to other domestic programs. Republican senators also threw in a provision that would block the Environmental Protection Agency from issuing new clean air rules. Only in the fevered dreams of corporate polluters could that help create jobs.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, bitterly accused Democrats of designing their infrastructure bill to fail by paying for it with a millionaire’s tax, as if his party’s intransigence was so indomitable that daring to challenge it is somehow underhanded.

The only good news is that the Democrats aren’t going to stop. There are many more jobs bills to come, including extension of unemployment insurance and the payroll-tax cut. If Republicans are so proud of blocking all progress, they will have to keep doing it over and over again, testing the patience of American voters.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/opinion/the-senate-puts-millionaires-before-jobs.html?hpw

[StephanieVanbryce]

Libertarians For Oligarchy?



David Frum November 4th, 2011 at 8:50 am

It’s an unusual day when Arnold Kling agrees with Paul Krugman.

But over at AEI’s online magazine, the libertarian Kling endorsed Krugman’s oft-asserted claim that the western world is moving into a new era of economic oligarchy. But whereas Krugman rails against this trend, Kling imperturbably accepts the apparent trend as the inevitable working of economic forces:[ http://www.american.com/archive/2011/november/what-if-middle-class-jobs-disappear/article_print ]

The recent trend in job polarization raises the possibility that gains in well-being that come from productivity improvements will accrue to an economic elite. Perhaps the middle-class affluence that emerged during the latter part of the industrial age is not going to be a feature of the information age.

Instead, we could be headed into an era of highly unequal economic classes. People at the bottom will have access to food, healthcare, and electronic entertainment, but the rich will live in an exclusive world of exotic homes and extravagant personal services. The most popular bands in the world will play house concerts for the rich, while everyone else can afford music downloads but no live music. In the remainder of this essay, I want to extend further this exercise in imagination and consider three possible scenarios.

If Kling is correct, similar trends should soon manifest themselves throughout the Western world. The United States is leading where others must soon follow.

Let’s interrogate this thought a little. Kling envisions (without much alarm) a world in which most of the gains from improved productivity are captured by a relatively small number of Americans: at best the top 60 million out of 300 million, more realistically the top 3 million or even possibly the top 300,000.

What happens in that scenario to political democracy?

After all, sooner or later everybody will wake up to what is going on, assuming they have not woken up already. The bottom 240 million or 297 million or 299.7 million have the votes. Won’t they try to use those votes to redistribute away from their new information-age economic betters?

More relevantly: won’t the information-age economic betters resist? Won’t they begin to perceive political democracy as a threat to their interests? Won’t they begin to work to subvert and curtail it?

It’s an ancient chestnut of political thought that the distribution of power follows the distribution of wealth. If and when wealth becomes more concentrated, so does power. That’s the story of the classical commonwealths, of the formerly participatory city-states of medieval Germany and Italy. If Kling is right, won’t it be the story of the United States too? How long can an economic oligarchy remain a political democracy? Why would it? Wouldn’t the oligarchs be reckless to permit it?

I’m not suggesting here that anyone will overthrow the Constitution or anything like that. The forms of American constitutionalism will remain intact, just as the forms of the British monarchy remain intact. We’ll still have elections, just as the British have royal weddings. (Indeed, many have noted that royal weddings have become more splendid and expensive exactly as power has ebbed from the monarchy. Back when monarchs ruled, the weddings were much less extravagant affairs.)

And after all, the Constitution that is now cherished as the bedrock of democracy served for three-quarters of a century to shield the economic interests of the Southern slaveocracy. If tightly restricted political power could be consistent with the Constitution from 1787 to 1861 it could be well be rendered so again.

Forms after all are much more conservative than realities. And in reality, the distribution of power tends to follow the distribution of wealth. If only a comparative few own, then only a comparative few will rule.

If it’s indeed inevitable as Kling hypothesizes that wealth must concentrate in the information age, then it’s equally inescapable that democracy must yield to a new political system that better protects the interests of those who possess it.

Understand that implication–and brood on it.


http://www.frumforum.com/libertarians-for-oligarchy