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Date Posted: 14:37:02 02/10/03 Mon
Author: Weird_Enigma
Author Host/IP: 209.252.119.23
Subject: The myth of class mobility

The myth of class mobility

The barriers between rich, poor in America remain very strong
JOHN R. MACARTHUR THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL

NEW YORK - As an American in good standing, I know that I'm supposed to be obsessed with race. But when the Bush administration intervened last month in favor of a lawsuit challenging the University of Michigan's "affirmative-action" rules, my thoughts turned not to bigotry and skin color, but to the great unmentionable secret in our society: class.

Nothing stops conversation at a New York cocktail party more abruptly than the evocation of economic inequality in our great land. In London or Paris, such musings might provoke a lively discussion, invective or a yawn, but nobody would take exception to the topic itself.

Class makes people so uncomfortable that they'd even prefer to discuss racism. And it doesn't matter much if you're talking to someone in the upper or lower class. The well-off don't want to hear it, because it offends their sense of entitlement; the less well-off still hope that the slogans about social mobility are true.

In the book "Dynamics of Child Poverty in Industrialized Countries" (2001), economists Peter Gottschalk and Sheldon H. Danziger reported on the fate of a racially diverse group of children whom they studied over 22 years, from 1970 to 1992.

Dividing the kids by family income into five segments, they found that of the children constituting the poorest 20 percent of the sample, 6 in 10 stayed in the bottom income bracket after l0 years, and 9 in 10 stayed in the bottom two income brackets in the same period.

The 1980s boom helped not at all: Children on the bottom two economic rungs stayed put over the succeeding decade. Born poor, stay poor.

In the top 20 percent followed in the study, only 2.4 percent fell to the bottom step.

Race does play a disproportionate role in poverty, of course. The U.S. Census reports that the current poverty rate among black children is 30 percent, compared with 9.5 percent for non-Hispanic white children.

But there are also many millions of disadvantaged white children. These are the class victims of industrial decline, youngsters whose parents lost their decent-paying factory jobs because of NAFTA and "Permanent Normal Trade Relations" with China.

When rich-kid candidate George W. Bush hurled the absurd accusation at well-to-do-kid Al Gore of engaging in "class warfare" (merely because Gore had noted America's accelerating income gap), I thought back to my own childhood, in monied Winnetka, Ill.

Every teenage boy I knew understood that kids from our world could beat the Vietnam draft by exploiting inherited privileges unavailable to our working-class compatriots.

In those days, a son of Winnetka could afford to stay in school as long it took to stay out of the Army. Then, in 1971, when the draft lottery finally replaced the student deferment, the young man -- like my older brother -- could afford a draft lawyer to fight a 1-A classification. If he was the son of a public figure with appearances to keep up, such as George W. Bush and Dan Quayle, he could arrange easy duty in the National Guard or, as in Al Gore's case, a short, soft tour in Vietnam as an army "reporter."

It's no surprise that about 80 percent of enlisted men in Vietnam came from poor or working-class families.

In allegedly egalitarian public grammar and high schools, affirmative action for the rich presents itself through the levy of the class-ridden property tax, which funds the greater share of public-school budgets nationwide. With a few exceptions, the wealthier districts get the best public schools simply because wealthier people live in them.

But of all the affirmative-action programs -- formal and informal -- that benefit the rich, none can beat the tax code. Absent compensatory social programs to redress the head starts granted to some Americans at birth, a low (38.6 percent) maximum income-tax rate guarantees a society in which inherited privilege holds the upper hand. Now the son of Greenwich, Conn., and Houston oil money, President Bush, proposes to eliminate the dividend and inheritance taxes altogether. The rich, it seems, are never rich enough.

With our inequalities in plain sight, how is it that so many people are so easily conned by the myth of classless America?

For one thing, certain rich people wear elaborate disguises. In Winnetka, we donned blue workshirts and blue jeans and listened to blues music to conceal our true status; the Bushes, father and son, hide their Wall Street roots behind a preposterous Texas facade of regular-guy entrepreneurial roughness -- as if the practice of raw capitalism somehow placed the well-paid boss on the same social and moral level as his underpaid employee.

And the fable of "stakeholder" democracy has been remarkably effective among laboring folks and upscale types alike.

Encouraged by unscrupulous politicians such as the Bushes and -- especially -- Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, a great many Americans were lately fooled into buying stock at the top of a market bubble. Now they're paying the price in extended working hours and delayed retirement.

We live in a huckster society, and vast numbers of citizens sustain themselves psychically with the adman's dream of getting rich quick.


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John R. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper's Magazine. He wrote this article for the Providence Journal.

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