Inequality Rises, Hip Hop is Dead, and Liberal America Keeps Dying

As so often happens with me, several discrete events came together to stimulate a lightbulb moment. One was a post by one of my favorite bloggers, field negro, which he titled “Time flies when you are having fun.” The second was a story buried in the New York Times’ Business section about how America�s income gap is widening. and the third is my son is briefly home from college on break bringing with him his voluminous CD collection. I have been playing one particular CD multiple times, NAS “Hip Hop is Dead,” especially the title song which is an amazing piece of work. Besides it blows a few minds when this white geezer with a cane sitting next to him drives up to the take-out window or the parking lot attendant with this CD blaring on the radio.
“Time flies when you are having fun” is a great post that is a one year anniversary milestone rumination that tells the story of the field negro�s blog and where it might be going. That started me thinking about this blog which is half as old.
As those few who have followed this site from the beginning may remember, I started this blog as a follow-up to my book, The Strange Death of Liberal America. After the book came out, I kept finding more examples of how the playing field continued to tilt. The blog became a way of supplementing the book, an online second edition. I also naively hoped that the blog would help bring more attention to book’s themes of America’s growing inequality, the Republican Counterrevolution that fostered it, and a Democratic Party that has lost its moral compass.
Six months later I question whether equality is an issue that resonates with America. I do not hear any Democratic presidential candidates talking about equality–not even John Edwards who made the phrase “Two Americas” resonate in the last campaign, but for reasons known only to him has decided to head in a different direction. Meanwhile Obama and Clinton seem in a race to see who can win the triangulation prize as each calculates their next speech and position paper with an eye to moving just a little this way or that in respect to the other.
The other candidates seem to take their roles as alternatives to the Big Three so seriously that few of them have offered anything memorable. Quickly tell me what Mike Gravel’s big idea is? Or Dennis Kucinich’s?
As for the mainstream media and the so-called progressive blogs, the Times‘ article represents as good a gauge as any of their interest in equality. The Times stuck the article below the fold in a corner of the business section. A search showed most other papers either buried it or did not carry the story. As for the blogs, a search on Technorati showed very few had any interest in it and those that did mainly reiterated the Times‘ story (I don’t need a blog to read the Times). On the other hand if you type Iraq or Gonzales or Elizabeth Edwards into a blog search be prepared to wait a bit for the results.
As usual, I went back to the original source which I found more interesting. I am embarrassed to say I did not know a great deal about the work of the two authors quoted in the Times study–Emmanual Saez and Thomas Picketty.
If you journey to Saez’s home page –a journey I would recommend by the way–you find that the Times‘ article is merely reporting an update of a study that originally appeared in 2003. Yet even I, who try to follow this issue closely had not seen that study. In short, the significant work that these two researchers have done has barely registered on the radar screen of America and that is a profound indictment of both the mainstream and Net media.
What is it about their work that makes it so important? Most people like me who follow income inequality tend to rely on Census Bureau data. These data are readily accessible and have a well-deserved reputation for reliability. Saez and Picketty, however, rely on a completely different data source, tax returns. When I saw this, I had one of those hit-yourself-in-the -head moments you have when you see a great idea.
In a recent reply the two wrote to a December 14 article by Alan Reynolds in the Wall Street Journal (where else) criticizing their results and methodology, they explained
Census Bureau figures, based on data which cannot measure top 1% incomes, misses the extraordinary gains going to the top 1%, which is perhaps the most striking change in the US income distribution in recent decades.
Tax return data, on the other hand, provide “a very accurate picture of reported incomes at the top.” Although economists have been using tax data for some time, the second extraordinary contribution made by Saez and Picketty is in their original article “INCOME INEQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES, 1913-1998″ which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in February 2003. That study, the author�s acknowledge, “is the first time that a homogeneous annual series of top wage shares starting before the 1950s for the United States has been produced.”
You can find all these studies at Saez’s web site. They document the success of a Republican Counterrevolution dedicated to restoring INEQUALITY to American society. One major finding in the 2003 article is that income for the very rich follows a U-shaped curve during the 20th century, being high in the early years and now high again. The low point in the curve is due to the Great Depression and World War II as well as another factor–the progressive income tax.
In their article the two note
The evidence suggests that the twentieth century decline in inequality took place in a very specific and brief time interval.
What helped contribute to that decline was the philosophy of the level playing field that was the hallmark of the New Deal and is at the center of The Strange Death of Liberal America. According to Saez and Packetty
These strongly redistributive policy reforms show that American society’s views on income inequality and redistribution greatly shifted from 1930 to 1945.
In 2003 the two concluded their study by correctly predicting
Our proposed interpretation also suggests that the decline of progressive taxation observed since the early 1980s in the United States could very well spur a revival of high wealth concentration and top capital incomes during the next few decades.
This month the two decided to see if new data validated their prediction. What they found is best explained in their letter to the Wall Street Journal.
Our work has shown the top 1% income share has increased dramatically in recent decades and has reached levels which had not been seen since before World War II and even since before the Great Depression when including capital gains. The reduction in taxes at the top since 2001 has mechanically exacerbated the discrepancy in disposable income between the rich and the rest of us. Thus, it is obvious that the progressive income tax should be the central element of the debate when thinking about what to do about the increase in inequality. Even conservatives like Alan Reynolds would agree and that is why they prefer to dismiss the facts about growing income inequality rather than face the debate on income tax progressivity at a time of growing economic disparity.
To me this paragraph is one of the most important anyone has written in the last year. It trumps Iraq and all the other things the blogs and mainstream media seem fixated on because it puts in plain English the New America we all now live in, a New America that has been given to us by the GOP Counterrevolution.
You could say that based on that paragraph the Counterrevolution has succeeded in its aims to reverse the New Deal. The consequences of that are reverberating through America right now, but they are happening at the individual family level and they are at the moment just beginning to appear in stories about the current home loan crisis, the college tuition crisis, and that favorite issue of presidential candidates–health care.
Yet even as Saez and Picketty connect the dots for us, right down to their acknowledgment of the role the ideology of the level playing field played in reducing inequality, most Americans and presidential candidates do not seem to see the big picture. It’s not that they can’t see the forest for the trees; these idiots appear to be focused on the bark!
This is where the CD “Hip Hop is Dead.” comes in, because unlike the 1930s or even the 1960s when protest music came from a variety of sources, hip hop has been the protest music of the current era, but most white folks don’t get that. That also echoes a theme from Strange Death, which is that it is people of color and women who have largely been holding America’s feet to the fire over the issue of equality.
It has been implied by others that this may explain why a blogdom dominated by big blogs largely run by white males both seems to have moved toward the middle of the road and also largely ignored equality issues. That why field negro’s ruminations resonated with me. He writes
I started to wonder why some of us black bloggers who have a different perspective on the issues and who have something to say about all the f****d up sh** affecting black folks in America aren’t expressing ourselves out here.
Like that post, Nas’ raps contain an ominous message that white folks had better pay attention to. His contention is that hip hop, like other forms of black music, has been expropriated and commercialized and is in danger of losing its roots. In the hands of some it’s become “house negro” music. The title cut says hip hop
Went from turntables to mp3s
From “Beat Street” to commercials on Mickey D’s
and ends with a symbolic scene that has 80 people from “my hood” who “came to show love” only to find
Sold out concert and the doors are closed shut
and the cut ends just like those shutting doors. I played that cut over and over because of those last words, “Sold out concert and the doors are closed shut” because that is what we ALL face if Saez and Picketty are even close to being right.
Nas may not have their research, instead he has “data” much more personal and real. Listen and see if you can hear those closing doors above all the BS about Iraq and Gonzales, because my guess is you can�t because these doors aren’t slamming shut loudly, instead they are quietly closing behind you. Meanwhile the circus out front distracts you from what is REALLY changing your lives and has already radically changed the lives of your kids. And some day soon the media circus will be over and you will find the concert sold out.
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