A Sobering Summary of the American Condition
On the blog Balkinization, Frank Pasquale paints a bleak picture of our prospects:
When TV talking heads prate about "shared sacrifice," they might want to pause to consider stories like Soto's [a quadriplegic whose story appears earlier in the blog post]. They should also reveal where a particular multimillionaire will invest gains from, say, the continuation of the Bush tax cuts, or the zeroed out estate tax of 2010. How much gold does the rotting teeth of the poor buy? Are volunteer dentists effectively subsidizing summer houses? Executive protection dogs? Private jets to summer camp?
These trade-offs become more compelling as data renders the narrative of "trickle down job creation" implausible. The most recent "recovery" saw 88% of gains go to corporate profits, and about 1% go to wages. Workers are caught in a downward spiral: unemployment reduces their bargaining power, which in turn lets bosses pile more duties onto fewer people, who effectively increase unemployment more by doing the work or 1.5 or 2 or 3 workers for the price of 1. Many women face the brunt of the transition: "When companies decide to lay off secretaries and assistants while making employees pick up the slack, women take the hit." Every margin has to be worked to keep CEOs' pay averaging hundreds of times that of their typical workers.
It’s an ugly picture.
And we (particularly those of us here in Mississippi) are in denial—deep, deep denial—and our elected officials are doing the very things guaranteed to make it worse.
Read the blog post, Shared Sacrifice of Whom?