Wealth and Poverty

Last year, I watched Robert Reich’s lecture series / college class, Wealth and Poverty.

Mr. Reich was the former Secretary of Labor under US president Bill Clinton, and recently retired from a professorship at UC Berkeley (where he taught the above course).
As Secretary, he was responsible for the last increase in Federal minimum wage, a huge achievement.
Reich remains active online on social media and on his website (I don’t like substack but it sure has made blogging easy).

As an aside, he had a Dolly Parton clip on his site, which the tv show The Orville also pays homage too.
I gotta get on the dolly train.

Course Summary

The lecture series was sooo informative about where inequality in America comes from.

• Wages havent kept pace with inflation, cost of living, or productivity.
  • Unionization has declined, part of a larger trend of reduced social organizing of all kinds, and also spurred by anti-labor laws like “Right to work”
  • Most sectors of the economy have become oligopolies or monopolies through lack of antitrust enforcement. This allow them to reduce wages and increase prices.
• Our taxation system gives massive breaks to the wealthy:
  • we dont have a wealth tax (capital gains does touch the principal, only growth)
  • private colleges recieve tax breaks well in excess of public institutins
  • local public services are typically funded by regressive property taxes
  • The above two put together mean that public education isnt as good as it should be
  • the income tax is very regressive, and would need to be replaced with UBI for people at the bottom
  • The IRS is underfunded and can’t go after the rich (regardless of whether the lack of taxes they pay is legal or not)
  • affordable housing and college was only provided to white people during the 60s-80s
• Towns bitterly fight for segregation by opposing affordable, dense housing and public transit, increasing commuting costs for all.
  • Urbanist groups point out this also artifically raises the cost of maintenance beyond what many towns can afford
• When mega-corporations fail, they are bailed out with amazing loans. Similar financial assistance is never availible to humans.
• The availible public assistance is “monotonic”, someone with assistance will never reach the income/wealth of someone not on assitance, dooming this person to remain on/eligible for assitance forever. This is done by capping eligibility with strict cutoffs, or through miniscule benefits. This necessarily means benefits do not reduce inequality or poverty.
• Our healthcare sucks.
• Socially minded enterprise cannot reduce inequality because they are often funded through “stolen wealth” (through aforementiond taxation and low wages)

What I Learnt

For a variety of reasons, our political system disenfranchises vast swaths of the population.
From at least the bottom 40% of our nation to perhaps the bottom 80-90% as well.
No one is coming to save us, except ourselves.