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.