In my last blog, I wrote about David Brooks' article on "The Inequality Problem." If you read it closely, you noted that I clarified the terminology of "framing" and suggested that the research is highly conflicted. Brooks argued those issues but in typical fashion limits his discussion to the two.
Now, here's the real substance from Robert Reich. Reich takes on nearly all the issues. In contrast, if you go back through Brooks' columns, you'll notice that originally he rejected the notion of inequality. Very slowly, he's coming around. But I'm not certain why it's always a devil of a time for Brooks to admit to the policy problems. This conservative that liberals love seems congenitally unable at that point. Not Robert Reich.
Brooks, you'll remember, argues that we should be focusing on the social problems of the poor, not on inequality. At best, that's a half-truth.
But Reich has the appropriate rejoinders: "Baloney" and "Hogwash!" His knowledge of policy, labor and economics means a better and different analysis of the inequality problem. And Reich gets down to the real stuff...
Reich points out that with financial growth going to the top, the purchasing power necessary for "buoyant growth" is screwed--nonexistent. Reich needs to add the historical and sociological insight that rising inequality can erode the social order and generate a populist backlash. The upper class once needed a middle class to support them. But in a global economy that may not be necessary. But that won't stop the potential for populist backlash. The kind of backlash that politicians are promoting in their failed immigration policies.
Inevitably, also, with the middle class stressed, it will become more and more unwilling to be generous to those in need. Or, as Reich puts it, when the fiscal cupboard is bare, the middle class can't pay more taxes. The hit impacts education, infrastructure, job training and social services. Clearly, the concentration of income and power at the top prevents Washington from dealing with the problems of both the poor and the middle class.
In sum: As wealth has accumulated at the top, Washington has reduced taxes on the wealthy, expanded tax loopholes that disproportionately benefit the rich, deregulated Wall Street, and provided ever larger subsidies, bailouts, and tax breaks for large corporations. The only things that have trickled down to the middle and poor besides fewer jobs and smaller paychecks are public services that are increasingly inadequate because they’re starved for money.
Unequal political power is the endgame of widening inequality — its most noxious and nefarious consequence, and the most fundamental threat to our democracy. Big money has now all but engulfed Washington and many state capitals — drowning out the voices of average Americans, filling the campaign chests of candidates who will do their bidding, financing attacks on organized labor, and bankrolling a vast empire of right-wing think-tanks and publicists that fill the airwaves with half-truths and distortions.
A theological note
Brooks, a devotee of Reinhold Niebuhr, the leading Christian theologian of the early 20th century, often brings theology into his columns. Sometimes stated, sometimes not. For example, he comments in The Art of Presence that theology is a grounding in ultimate hope, not a formula book to explain away each individual event. Although he's correct that theology is not a formula book, his overall statement suffers from a very limited perspective. He needs to re-read our mutual friend, Reinhold Niebuhr, and at least the "Jewish texts."
The core of the biblical tradition emphasizes economics and justice. With the exception of Jim Wallis (Sojourner Magazine), few Evangelicals ever touch the problem of inequality. They're still playing with the fall-out from the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy of the early 20th century. Whenever American Catholicism walks away from its fixation on sexuality, it too deals constructively with the problem of inequality. So-called liberal Christianity seems to be gun-shy.
But the biblical texts are very specific. They shout! They identify people who live generatively in the community both to sustain and enhance the community’s well-being. These people are not greedy or self-sufficient, but show special attentiveness to the poor and needy. These people would reject the notion that the poor and needy are of lesser morality. Instead, by their presence and their actions, they lend stability to the community. As the prophets and Jesus speak about the covenant faith, it has both economic and political dimensions.
These believers see their entry into faith as a new vision of reality, a life-giving and community fulfilling vision. A vision of reality with all sorts of new possibilities that society thinks is impossible. It really is an oddity--at odds with all the conventional orderings of society, political, economic and social. This faith uses the vision of justice and not in a punitive sense, but as distributive. So the Bible talks about that justice in terms of the available quantities of goods, the actual process by which goods are to be distributed and the allocation of the goods to all members of the community. Thus being "righteous" or “compassionate,” is not about a psychological or feeling-based morality, but about politics and distributive justice to the entire community. Just and righteous are about doing what is right for the global community. The contexts change, but the message remains. And it is the overall trajectory of the Old Testament and its Appendix, what we call the New Testament.
Once more: The Biblical tradition of life, freedom and fulfillment in both Old Testament and the New Appendix, is about two seemingly secular matters: politics and economics. Robert Reich is literally on the side of the biblical angels, while David Brooks is merely dipping his toes into the water.
Flickr photo: Drake University