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September 4, 2006

Working for a living: The Stagnation Tax; Summer's end, basil, labor and sand

11:13 a.m.
Working for a living: In The Stagnation Tax at TPMCafe, Stirling Newberry -- Net consultant, liberal and principal in an equity fund -- tours, at some length, the last 100 years of both parties' economic policies, history and politics on the way to here.

I'm not blogging this post because I agree with him -- I haven't thought these ideas through yet -- but because there is a lot to think about here: Triggers.

Doc Searls opens a post about it today (Growing new answers) by agreeing with an old friend who said, "The republican party is about income production and the democratic party is about income redistribution".

Perhaps that was an old line. Newberry mentions "the redistributive rightism we've had - which has redistributed gains generated by the whole society upward" and examines income production and productivity at length:

...if 1975 wages had gone up with productivity, real wages would be twice what they are today.

Here's how he kicks it off:

The New York Times wants to argue the glass is half full, but then admits at the bottom that it is very full for the top 5%, and bone dry for everyone else. The reality is that virtually all Americans are paying the stagnation tax - an economy where productivity across most of the economy is basically flat. The average looks fine, but then, on average everyone gets up from the poker table with the same amount of money they started with....

But what originally drew me to click the link was this paragraph that Doc pulled out:

I've brought up these issues before, and regularly I've been told "well you don't have solutions". Actually there were solutions ­ and still are solutions. However, the require a different relationship between citizen and government. That, not the technical and economic factors, was what was decisive in the end. In the end Americans wanted to be consumers. And they were willing to pay a great deal to be consumers. This is an economic trade off ­ the hours that people have spent skiing and reading porn and watching television and mowing the lawn that they would otherwise have spent being involved in community and government, and feeling responsible for the consequences. However, the question is ­ is that free time worth $16 dollars an hour ­ because that is what the ordinary person is paying for it. Watching an hour of Law and Order or 24 might be amusing. But is it worth $16/hour. The answer for a long time, for the majority of Americans, was "yes".

Now it is becoming "no".

Elsewhere this weekend I typed, " 'Online life' is an oxymoron." Life goes on without us when we're mesmerized by our attention toys. Steeped in the illusion of being highly networked, I am guilty of severe cave behavior.

The language -- the writing -- of economics and sociology makes the Newberry post rough slogging at first. (Writers rushing not quite at the speed of thought really should revisit their sentences later, in case they need to pop in a verb or lop off the dangling stub of a dropped idea.)

But at the end,

...The solution American chose was to pay the stagnation tax, leave their children alone and at risk to the world, and to pursue hobbies and the cult of small things while others ran the country. They wake up to find that the fees for that management were particularly high, and that it hasn't outperformed the marketplace - that they wake up today with declining wages, less access to health insurance, less and less affordable housing, less access to moving up the career ladder - and a political system that does not seem to be responding.

However if the beginning of the road is in 1969, the end of the road must be in Iraq. Iraq is the war that the reactionary system had to fight, it had no choice. What the reactionary system sold was "work hard and you can get a bigger and bigger house and a bigger and bigger car." Since these were two of the visible measures of growth in the old liberal economy, continuing them at the cost of all else was enough to swing enough voters in the south to swing the country from Democratically dominated to Republican dominated. They did not lose enough votes in the rural and suburban Northeast to lose the country.

There are reports circulating about the dire condition of Iraq. Their intent, within the current governing coalition, is to get more, not less, money for Iraq - they argue that in order to stabilize Iraq more money is needed, and that money will have to come from someplace. If not from weapon systems, then from medicare and domestic spending. ...

The country wants answers, and hungers for ideas. There are ideas out there, but they are not going to come from the expected places.

Start thinking. There's a lot to digest here, perhaps in small bites over time. Comments show promise, too.

3:08 a.m.
Herb harvest:
Fresh Basil Pesto Recipe at Simply Recipes. If you have a bumper crop of basil, you can freeze this.

Day off: Labor Poems and Songs

Hard Workin’ Woman by Mississippi Matilda at Honey Where You Been So Long: Pre-War Blues. There's an mp3 there.

Bread and Roses
By James Oppenheim

The American Magazine 73 (December 1911).

As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing, "Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses."

As we come marching, marching, we battle, too, for men --
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes --
Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses.

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread;
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew --
Yes, it is bread we fight for -- but we fight for Roses, too.

As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days --
The rising of the women means the rising of the race --
No more the drudge and idler -- ten that toil where one reposes --
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.

Background: Bread and Roses: The Lost Histories of a Slogan and a Poem

Bureau of Labor Statistics:

In 2005, full-time wage and salary workers who were union members hadmedian usual weekly earnings of $801, compared with a median of $622 for wage and salary workers who were not represented by unions. (See table 2.) The difference reflects a variety of influences in addition to coverage by a collective bargaining agreement, including variations in the distributions of union members and nonunion employees by occupation, industry, firm size, or geographic region.

Over: Sand Sculpture Projects by Kirk Rademaker

Cheer yourself up: Copy this URL, paste it into your browser's location bar, type your own name instead of (yournamehere) and close up the spaces between the // and the period. Hit enter.

http:// (yourname here) .youaremighty.com/

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:13 AM | Permalink