Sunday, April 19, 2020

Opinion | The America We Need - The New York Times



The pandemic has exposed two deep truths: the fifty year Republican assault on the public sector has left us unprepared for this crisis, and the moral deficiency which that drive expressed has left us in the hands of an incompetent President incapable of empathy.

The New York Time Editorial Board begins today a long series of essays by addressing the roots of our failure. 

If you click through to the Times story you will find a 24 minute audio.
- GWC
Opinion | The America We Need - The New York Times: '

by The Editorial Board

The pandemic has shown Americans how far apart they are. But out of this crisis there’s a chance to build a better nation.

****since the late 1960s, the federal government has largely abandoned the attempt. The defining trend in American public policy has been to diminish government’s role as a guarantor of personal liberty.


Advocates of a minimalist conception of government claim they too are defenders of liberty. But theirs is a narrow and negative definition of freedom: the freedom from civic duty, from mutual obligation, from taxation. This impoverished view of freedom has in practice protected wealth and privilege. It has perpetuated the nation’s defining racial inequalities and kept the poor trapped in poverty, and their children, and their children’s children.

One of the most important aspects of this retreat was the government’s role in constructing a new residential landscape of economically and racially segregated communities. The government built highways that carried white families to new suburban neighborhoods where minorities often were not allowed to live; it provided mortgage loans that minorities were not allowed to obtain; and even after explicit discrimination was declared illegal, single-family zoning laws continued to exclude low-income families, particularly minorities.

Policymakers tied funding for public services to the prosperity of the new communities, and the Supreme Court blessed the practice in a 1973 ruling, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, that allowed differences in school funding based on differences in local property values. The effect was to substitute economic segregation for explicitly racial segregation.
The government similarly enabled growing divisions in the workplace. As the economy shifted from manufacturing to services, corporations — with the help of Congress and local lawmakers — successfully resisted the unionization of new jobs. And the government declined to replace organized labor as the protector of workers in burgeoning sectors like retail and health care.

Companies were not required to provide employees with basic benefits like paid leave, and they were given free rein to claim that many of their full-time workers were actually contractors. The purchasing power of the federal minimum wage has been falling since 1968.

A shift in corporate behavior also harmed workers. Many business leaders rallied around a narrow conception of corporate responsibility, arguing the sole obligation of a corporation was to maximize shareholder returns. Policymakers backed the shift, notably by writing that narrow definition into the laws of Delaware, where many large companies maintain official homes.

The results are clear enough: Executive pay has skyrocketed, and shareholders have enjoyed rising stock prices, at least until recently, while most workers are falling behind. If individual income had kept pace with overall economic growth since 1970, Americans in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution would be making an extra $12,000 per year, on average. In effect, the extreme increase in inequality means every worker in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution is sending an annual check for $12,000 to a worker in the top 10 percent.

The idealization of individual action in an open marketplace has had its mirror image in the denigration of collective action through government.

The United States does not guarantee the availability of affordable housing to its citizens, as do most developed nations. It does not guarantee reliable access to health care, as does virtually every other developed nation. The cost of a college education in the United States is among the highest in the developed world. And beyond the threadbare nature of the American safety net, the government has pulled back from investment in infrastructure, education and basic scientific research, the building blocks of future prosperity. It is not surprising many Americans have lost confidence in the government as a vehicle for achieving the things that we cannot achieve alone.

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