Today’s column:
…My dream Obama would nurture investment in three ways…
Third, Obama could talk obsessively about family structure and social repair. Every week we get another statistic showing how social and income inequality is dividing the nation…
Because of his upbringing, President Obama is uniquely qualified to talk about family structures. Traditional values are an investment in the young, and he could do what he can to restitch the social fabric. If we don’t address this problem, inequality will be worse 30 years from now no matter what else we do.
Categories: Fatherhood, Marriage
David Brooks never fails in his inability to relate to the lives and challenges of ordinary USians. I’m amazed that someone who apparently is extraordinarily isolated has such a large forum.
For example: where are all these “affluent elderly” I keep hearing about? They sure aren’t out here in the rust belt. Here, the elderly (mostly women) are even poorer than their service-industry-working grandchildren. Social Security at age 70—is he kidding? In an era when the overwhelming majority of people do not have a pension, the few who do are finding their pensions going *poof* due to bankruptcy? And what about that pesky fact the we still have bodies bodies that actually age and thus aren’t capable of doing the work we did when we were younger, even setting aside the fact that age discrimination in employment is Very Real and workers over 50 are frequently put out to pasture?
There is nothing that would be more singularly unhelpful than lectures about “family structure” to actual families who are doing the best they can with limited resources. Lectures don’t pay for rent, groceries, utility bills or gasoline. Family structure is not going to change one iota until our economic structure changes. Whole communities have been abandoned and left scrambling for the most expletive-deleted jobs that Brooks himself would never get out of bed for. Even at gunpoint.
We’ve heard all the bootstrap lectures that every pampered pundit has ever imagined in his or her life, for our entire lives. And we’ve tugged on those straps ’till they snapped and we made do with what’s left, or until we’ve snapped. Because y’know—sometimes what doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you stronger. It just breaks you instead. There’s a lot of that out here in “flyover country”.
The expletive-deleted with Brooks’ “dreams”. The only dreams I’m concerned with right now are my daughter’s dreams. She dreams of getting out of central Illinois and never coming back. I’m going to make that happen by any means necessary. Nothing Brooks has to offer helps. Well, in the online version. The print version is at least good for wrapping garbage in, or starting a fire. /end rant
My main reaction was that Brooks wants Obama to be a liberal! Not a centrist and not following Reagan.
I love the idea of no taxes under $100,000 income, but I don’t think a value-added tax (federal sales tax) would be a good idea. It hits everyone and does not make life easier for people with lower income.
@LaLubu – wealthy elderly people may not be in Illinois, but they exist. What Brooks is suggesting is that people with high incomes shouldn’t get Social Security, or perhaps should get less of it. Would you support a policy chance so that people with incomes over $100,000/year didn’t get Social Security payments? or that they had to pay more for their own medical care?
@LaLubu – one other quick thought – Brooks suggested that by reducing Social Security benefits for some wealthy people, there could be more money for students to go to college.
@LaLuba says “Family structure is not going to change one iota until our economic structure changes.”
What do you mean? Furthermore, I agree our economic structure is in shambles. Fixing it should start with reforming the tax code. Abolish income tax and have a federal sales tax. Tax people on what they SPEND not on what they EARN.
Donna M., the percentage of people with incomes of over $100,000 is so low that it wouldn’t make much of a difference. The bottom line is that most people of our age group do not have pensions, even fewer younger adults have pensions, and very few people earn enough money to be able to sock enough away for retirement. In short, the ordinary USian needs to be paid more—a lot more. Real wages have stagnated for people without a college education almost as long as I’ve been alive. That isn’t sustainable. It also isn’t sustainable to tell people to just keep working until they’re 70, because most won’t be able to and most employers will not keep elderly employees on (note: especially when it comes to health insurance). Brooks is far from the only one with the delusion that most USians have plush desk jobs; it’s past due time to end that myth.
When it comes to college, we need to just bite the bullet and treat it like high school—make it fully publically funded, and anyone who wants to go can go. In the long run I think we’d be better off.
ZZtstenglish, marriage is connected with stability—financial, employment, community, etc. Marriages don’t support the rest of society; stability in the rest of the community is what creates and supports the conditions for stable marriages. When people have no steady employment or family-style earnings, they choose not to marry.
I’m going to keep on saying it: let’s have an experiment. Create the equivalent of the kind of jobs my grandparents had—good pay, full benefits, and keep those jobs alive and well for at least a decade. I predict there will be more marriages and less divorce in that community. That is the difference between the college-educated and the non-college-educated: the college-educated have better pay, more benefits and stable careers—they can count on having a certain modicum of economic stability to plan (and save) for the future. They have “portable” job skills in careers that aren’t as subject to market fluctuations, so they can land on their feet even if they become unemployed (and will spend far less time being unemployed than the non-college-educated).
I’m opposed to a flat tax or a sales tax instead of a progressive income tax. Lower income people don’t magically need fewer calories just because they earn less, and they don’t have access to energy-efficient housing (translation: they pay more for utilities, which under a sales tax means they’d pay even more. Winters are already hard enough on struggling folks). My problem as a working class person isn’t taxes—it’s wholesale disinvestment by both the private and the public sector in my community. We are frankly seen as surplus labor—superfluous at other times.
@LaLuba – But we ALREADY have a tax system that taxes people more if they have a higher income and frankly, it doesn’t work. A flat tax or a federal sales tax is more fair. A ‘Robin Hood Tax’ punishes people for working harder or for being succesful.
Canada introduced a Federal Sales Tax called the GST / HST and it addresses your concerns to lower income people (although they didn’t abolish income tax). What they did was have exemptions on basic things like groceries and gave a quarterly rebate to low income people. The system actually BENEFITS low income people.
I’ll address your other point about economic structure / family later because I have to go now…
what traditional values is he talking about and why is obama uniquely suited?
Diane,
In theory I don’t have any objections to reduced Social Security benefits for wealthy elderly. However in addition to La Lubu’s point as to whether this would really make much of an impact on the larger fiscal picture, the history of US social welfare policy shows why this is a problematic idea. Historically programs that are means tested, such as the old AFDC program, food stamps, etc. are politically easy to marginalize, as well as stigmatize with thinly veiled racial and gender prejudice, eg. “welfare queens”, urban legends about all the lobsters people on food stamps buy, etc.–I live in Boston, the lobster is probably the regional version of the myth.
Non-means tested program such as social security, unemployment although targets of the right wing in this country have far more popular support because of thier universal eligiblity. I have little doubt that within a nano second of means testing social security, David Brooks will be writing columns bemoaning the culture of dependency among poor elderly and the need to get tough.
As for retiring at 70, I am always astounded at the class blindness of people. I have no doubt, assuming no health crisis, that David Brooks can continue to crank out insipid columns for the NYT until he is 80. The woman who likely cleans his house, or tends to his garden it is a little more difficult.
La Lubu,
Just to be clear, the number of households making over $100,000 a year in the U.S. is 15.9%, slightly more than 25% of households make over $75,000 a year. The median income in the U.S. in 2011 was $50,500.
There is no denial that the largest cohort of American households (28%) are making less than $25,000 a year and that their take home pay isn’t stretching to cover all their needs.
Even so I think it is important to note that Americans, on average, take home more money than just about everyone else – and that it is possible for Americans of modest means to still live well and to plan for their retirement and family’s future. I am able to live in New York, safe for my retirement (which won’t include a pension, I can promise you that), and also splurge occasionally on a vacation or some other significant expense while working on a think tank researcher’s salary. Don’t sell working American’s short, we can do a good deal with the money we earn.
I am not sure that higher education needs to be provided by the state – I worry that federal subsidies in the forms of grants are already distorting the higher-education market by driving up costs at a much faster rate than inflation, creating a student-loan bubble which will almost certainly pop and create more economic turmoil.
If we are biting the bullet on something, I think it should be healthcare, but we’ll have to decide if we want the market or the state in charge and settle on it. And if we go with the state, we need to expect to pay for it with higher taxes and some shortages of rare services that the state will attempt to eliminate to be cost efficient.
If we could set a flat tax low enough (10-15%) that it didn’t burden the poorest households unduly while also eliminating all the loopholes that wealthier Americans use to avoid paying higher rates, it might work, but I hear you on your concerns there.
Brook’s wrote this column after his last column got him laughed at.
Kevin Drum say it better than I could:
(After last week’s debacle, where he got hammered for claiming that Barack Obama had no plan to replace the sequester)
Plus it ignores the elephant in the room. Drum again:
(Brooks thinks it would be hard to get liberals on board with this, and he’s probably right about that. But that’s hardly worth worrying about, since conservatives would be loudly and adamantly dead set against every single aspect of his proposal. They don’t want universal pre-K; they don’t want to spend more on a bunch of lefty universities; they don’t really care about infrastructure; and they don’t want a VAT.)
(Abolish income tax and have a federal sales tax. Tax people on what they SPEND not on what they EARN.)
A sales tax one of the most regressive taxes you can have. It falls harder on the poor than the rich and doesn’t generate as much income as other more progressive taxes.
(as a household’s income rises, even significantly, the tax collected remains almost the same. So as a proportion of available expenditure the tax burden falls far more heavily on households with lower incomes.)
@LaLubu – “I’m going to keep on saying it: let’s have an experiment. Create the equivalent of the kind of jobs my grandparents had—good pay, full benefits, and keep those jobs alive and well for at least a decade. I predict there will be more marriages and less divorce in that community.”
I think one of the issues, though, is that when you have families with two incomes, their spending power is automatically a huge step above families with one income. Even if the incomes per person aren’t that far apart.
I certainly believe that having more jobs with decent salaries and benefits would help, but I think there would still be another issue here.
(What they did was have exemptions on basic things like groceries and gave a quarterly rebate to low income people. The system actually BENEFITS low income people.)
Sadly no. The exemptions are not that expansive. Plus I just did a friend of mines taxes – she made less then $13,000 last year. Her GST rebate was $340. My mother made $26,000 a year and her rebate was $400. These are not princely sums.
@LaLuba – When you link economics to marriages, you are correct. That’s why the state INVESTS in marriage / family and the return on that investment are productive participants (ie: children) in society. That’s why I oppose same-sex marriage because it’s a misallocation of taxes. Expanding benefits to more childless marriages yields no benefit to society. If anything, it’s a waste of tax money.
Check out this study called Economic Assessment of Same-Sex Marriage Laws by Douglas Allen.
http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/samesexmarriage.pdf
The kind of jobs our grandparents had were not two-income jobs. Men were expected to support their wife and children, that was how a man was not a failure. It didn’t have to be a great job, even if their standard of living was poor, he was a success by virtue of his wife and children just surviving with him and respecting him as the head of the household. A second income designates him a failure and superfluous. And a job just “created” for him in order to make him rich enough to marry also disrespects him, and I suspect La Luba’s experiment would make things worse in the long run, because it is by nature devoid of respect. It’s the respect as men doing what men should do and taking care of women that makes men happy and feel like it’s worth it to support a wife and family, but that is something that our grandfathers could expect, but not us, not since Gloria Steinem said men were like bicycles for fish.
@Mont – “Exemptions are not that expansive”
Groceries are exempted. I just crossed the border last week and there is no GST / HST on groceries.
Next, what I’m proposing is to tweak the system to include more exemptions on basic necessities like shelter (or something like that).
@Mont D Law “Plus I just did a friend of mines taxes – she made less then $13,000 last year. Her GST rebate was $340. My mother made $26,000 a year and her rebate was $400. These are not princely sums.”
Do you have any info on how much people pay in VAT (or whatever the value-added tax is called)?
I don’t like value-added taxes because they hit everyone and poor people actually have to spend a higher percentage of their income.
However, I think it’s worth noting that France has a VAT, but it also has price controls on things like bread, free child care, free health care, good public education, low-cost mass transit, nearly free college, and all kinds of allowances people can get. So perhaps that offsets the VAT.
@Matthew Kaal and LaLubu:
“the number of households making over $100,000 a year in the U.S. is 15.9%, slightly more than 25% of households make over $75,000 a year. The median income in the U.S. in 2011 was $50,500.”
So maybe one of the issues in the US is geographic inequalities?
If so, how could we do something about that?
And in terms of marriage and family structure, if certain areas of the US have many people who can’t earn a living and therefore end up divorcing/never marrying, you’ll have concentrations of not-marriage. That will lead to even more divorce, etc.
@Matthew – Here’s a better idea. How about 1% cut in spending across the board so it’s fair. In other words, a 1% cut in military spending, foreign aid, education, arts funding, healthcare, etc.
Wait—so you’re advocating just one career per family? So, in order to have both career and family, adults would have to remain unmarried? If they were married they’d have to pick either/or? That doesn’t make any sense to me.
Speak for yourself Manny; my grandparents were two-income earners. My grandfathers were not considered “failures”, nor did they consider themselves “failures”. The men who received WPA jobs didn’t consider themselves “failures” either—those were real jobs, with real paychecks, that put real food on the table. Nothing at all to be ashamed about. And any man—or woman—who requires someone else to be less-than in order to be proud of themselves is a person who is too toxic to be in a relationship with. Everyone needs a sense of pride and the opportunity to live up to one’s adult responsibilities and gain mastery. Those aren’t gendered needs, and there isn’t a gendered path to get there.
What I see driving inequality in my region is instability of employment—people can’t count on being employed. No sooner do they get some saving built up, than boom! the next round of unemployment hits and all the savings rapidly evaporate. And then the same thing happens again. And again. Sometimes it isn’t unemployment; sometimes it’s a health crisis or some other emergency. But there’s always too many responsibilities and not enough resources. People never get the chance to recover. It’s physically and psychologically draining. And there is *no reason for it*. None at all. There is *no excuse* for the abandonment of these communities.
In my more cynical moments, I just shrug and figure it’ll all get washed out after the next civil war. Because if this trend continues, there will be one.
(Groceries are exempted.)
Some groceries are exempt, about 1/4 of what you buy in any given trip to the store. Apples yes, peanut butter no. Fresh meat yes, canned tuna no.
(Do you have any info on how much people pay in VAT (or whatever the value-added tax is called)?)
It doesn’t really matter. My every penny my friend spends is on goods and services. While the percent paid may be the same the tax hits her harder because it eats money she needs to exist day to day. That’s why it’s regressive.
@Mont – “That’s why it’s regressive”
And that’s why I suggest tweaking the system to abolish income tax or include more exemptions.
“Some groceries are exempt”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_Services_Tax_(Canada)
“Common zero-rated items include basic groceries, prescription drugs, inward/outbound transportation and medical devices (GST/HST Memoranda Series ME-04-02-9801-E 4.2 Medical and Assistive Devices). Certain exports of goods and services are also zero-rated.”
By the way, I use to live in Canada. My family still lives there and I visit often.
@Mont D Law – I asked about how much people pay in VAT in order to see how to stacks up against the rebate they get.
And I suppose, how much they might pay if they were paying an income tax here.
@LaLubu – No, I’m not suggesting that we kick women out of the labor force. I’m suggesting that if one group of people has jobs but only one income/household, they will still be poorer than the people with two incomes/household. So getting stable jobs might not be enough. The one-income group would still be relatively poor.
I don’t see an easy policy solution, but if the choices are make two-parent families give up an income, make people get divorced, or increase the number of two-parent families, I would go with the last one. It’s more likely to make people happy.
@LaLubu “Everyone needs a sense of pride and the opportunity to live up to one’s adult responsibilities and gain mastery.”
Just wanted to put in a reminder that an at-home mom or dad is living up to their adult responsibilities and gaining mastery.
However, I agree with you that men should not need their wives to stay home and women should not be forced to do so.
It would be nice if families could afford to have one partner out of the labor force or earning less, at least for a few years. (or two partners doing it and somehow not losing more money than one doing it.)
It’s hard to figure out how to get to that, but it certainly starts with stable jobs that pay a living wage and have benefits.
@LaLubu – “There is nothing that would be more singularly unhelpful than lectures about “family structure” to actual families who are doing the best they can with limited resources.”
I think there is a difference between the President talking about the problems related to family structure and lecturing people. It could, in theory be a chance to say we have a problem and we need to strengthen families by:
making sure they have jobs;
making sure they can afford health care and stay out of debt;
providing mental health care and drug rehabilitation programs;
helping them afford an education that might lead to jobs;
providing classes and counseling for couples;
talking about the benefits of marriage to a family; and
teaching young people about conflict resolution, etc. some time before marriage.
Hey, maybe we could create my dream of a experimental Marriage and Family Centers in a neighborhood providing all kinds of services to strengthen marriages and families.
@DianeM: one-income doesn’t necessarily equal “poor”, especially if you take into account whether a family that relies on one income is doing so because that income is large enough that a second income isn’t necessary to keep the lights on.
Though it’s refreshing to hear Manny come out and admit that what he really wants is to keep women barefoot and pregnant (through their husbands’ sperm, of course!) so that men can have that warm, fuzzy feeling that comes with having another adult dependent on you for food and shelter.
Re taxation, the flat tax is a gift to high-income folks, particularly those who rely on capital gains rather than earned income; that’s why every flat-tax proposal you see exempts capital gains. As for whether such a tax could be fair, I once asked a relative who is a CPA if she wasn’t worried about a flat tax putting her out of business. When she stopped laughing long enough to breathe again, she explained that a) it will never happen, because people will always want ‘….except for this deduction that benefits me’, and b) corporations will give up the tax structure that benefits their income-juggling when you pry it out of their cold, dead, metaphorical hands.
@mythago – he’s not actually promoting a flat tax. He’s suggesting that everyone with an income under $100,000 will pay nothing, but then you pay value-added (sales) tax. And presumably payroll taxes.
I’m not sure what the percent tax on the VAT would be, but my guess is that it would end up costing as much or more as the taxes I pay now. If most of your income ends up getting spent, you would end up paying taxes on most of your income.
I know one income doesn’t equal poor. It’s just that if you have a group of high-earning two-income couples, it will be harder for one-earner families to keep up with them. I was thinking of the difference between having two-parents and one – if one group of families has a high rate of divorce and break-ups, they aren’t going to be able to compete with the group of families with two parents in terms of earnings. So even if they all got better jobs, there would be a class divide unless family stability went up.
So? This would be immaterial if the one-income family had all their needs met. Why assume competition? All the married couples I know are two-income families, and yeah, they have more wealth than I do. They enjoy a few more luxuries than I do. But my income is sufficient to live a good life. My bills are paid, I have health insurance and a pension, I sock 10% away in my 401k, plus I still have enough left over to provide luxuries for myself and my daughter—educational, recreational, and just plain fluff (like takeout when I just don’t feel like cooking). I’m not worried about “competing” with anybody. As far as I’m concerned, if I had guaranteed full-time employment ’till the age of 60? I’d have it made in the shade.