Economic inequality and the lack of a (real) progressive party in the United States

[telemann]

Last Friday, Chris Rock was interviewed on Bill Maher's show Real Time, and the subject of health care reform came up.
When Maher asked if he saw health care reform the prism of race and as a civil rights issue, Rock said no. He sees health reform as a “people rights issue.” Rock also recounted his family’s experience with the health care system

Comments

Why the "average person" (and even many poor people) aren't outraged:

[box_in_the_box]

America makes much more sense once you realize that, in all of our national self-mythologizing, both the left and the right have fostered the notion that we are essentially all destined to win the lottery

or, putting it another way...............

[op_tech_glitch]

http://www.namebase.org/richnote.html

Re: Why the "average person" (and even many poor people) aren't outraged:

[merig00]

or maybe people just don't want to go down the road of Greece where people riot in the streets each time they don't get their entitlements

[box_in_the_box]

This makes the objectively untrue assumption that a majority of these people are aware of or care about anything that's being done in any country other than America.

[underlankers]

Except that in the United States of the present day, anything to the Left of Genghis Khan is bloody red Bolshevism about to execute anyone making more than 150,000 and leave piles of chopped-off heads and hands as a warning to other would-be Kulaks. Americans choose to forget that Class is both far from a new issue and that the Founders responded to Tea Bagger wannabes by pouring volleys of musketfire into them.

[politikitty]

[nevermind6794]

I assume the unsustainable safety net you're talking about is Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security? Because food stamps, etc. are a tiny portion of our spending.

[politikitty]

Absolutely. I think Social Security is fairly fixable if we simply readjust our expectations to expect that an older population should work longer. I understand that people like to go "grawr! defense!" but like adding progressivity to our income tax, it doesn't go far in addressing the problem.

The fundamental problem in our budget really does boil down to Medicare. It's the main budget concern that trends so far out of line with inflation. Hell, I was shocked when I looked at the numbers of what we spend on Medicaid, which should be included as a safety net. We don't have a handle on health care costs, and while there are great aspects to recent legislation, I fail to see that cost is one of them.

[penguin42]

The CBO estimated that preventative treatment made more available by the health care plan will reduce Medicare costs in the long run (this is where the "reduce our deficit by a trillion after 10 years" comes from). I'm not sure how they calculated this though.

[ryder_p_moses]

Isn't it possible that there's no real progressive movement because the power disparity between rich and poor is so great? People draw up comparisons to turn of the century industrialization, but if you draw a broader net and look at, say, incidence of peasant uprisings in the Dark Ages, or slave rebellions in pre-Civil War America, you see pretty similar trends. Small, undirected individual outbursts of violence, crime by the poor and desparate preying on the poor and desperate, extremely rare general revolts that are typically put down brutally and successfully, great sections of the population comprising an invisible underclass so little acknowledged by the media and intelligentsia of the time that to this day we've got very little idea what their actual lives were like, outside a mythologizing narrative crafted by masters concerned only with themselves

[nevermind6794]

Isn't it possible that there's no real progressive movement because the power disparity between rich and poor is so great?

Probably. I'm sure there's some argument to be made about systematic disenfranchisement, too.

It's funny that today's "silent majority" is generally poor and a minority. I wonder how Nixon would feel about that.

[nevermind6794]

I saw these graphs the other day, and I'm still appalled.

That said, a few mitigating factors:

Most households 40-50 years ago were single-income. It's much more common now for wives, even kids to work.

It used to be that you could get a job at an assembly line out of high school, work for 20-30 years at a good salary, and retire with a strong pension. That obviously isn't the case anymore; the U.S. economy relies on higher education and services now, but we're still going through growing pains on that front.

The cost of housing and food has generally decreased over the last 40-50 years. Health care and higher education, notably, have risen faster than inflation, but the point is just that cost of living has to be considered here.

[merig00]

There was a study not that long time ago - even poor in USA live on large square footage then middle class in Europe.

[sealwhiskers]

Show me this study. As a European living in the US currently I call bullshit. It may be so that people live in larger places on average, because there is simply more land in the US, but it says nothing about living quality or standards.

[telemann]

MOAR ROOMY HOMES IN AMURICA!