America Ascendant

by Stanley B Greenberg

  Their key starting point is refuting the assertion of “middle-class decline,” “the vanishing middle class,” and the conclusion that “things have gotten worse for middle-income Americans.” They have focused like a laser on President Obama’s observation in Kansas that “over the last few decades, the rungs of the ladder of opportunity have grown further apart, and the middle class has shrunk” and Council of Economic Advisers chairman Alan Krueger’s indisputable observation that there are fewer people clustered around the median income and more at the top and the bottom.74

  That is beside the point. Burkhauser and his collaborators spend a lot of time factoring in changes in household size, posttax income, transfers such as tax credits and food stamps, and health insurance. They believe that those in the middle of the income scale saw their income rise 37 percent over these three decades. That is about 1.1 percent a year and very close to the consensus calculations of the Economic Policy Institute, the Center for American Progress, the Council of Economic Advisers, and economists from the major banks.

  They fail to note what a change this represents from the post–World War II period that shaped the baby boomers and others. And disingenuously, they fail to note the contrast in fortunes with the top 1 percent. That line does not appear anywhere.

  Perhaps most egregious is their lack of curiosity about what periods produced this 37 percent gain for the middle class over three decades. Well, it turns out that half the income growth came in the period dominated by Bill Clinton’s economic and tax policies. During the Clinton period, it grew by 16.8 percent, double the average for the Republican presidents (8.3 percent). I wonder why that was not mentioned?75

  Moreover, after all of their calculations to factor in tax credits and food stamps, it is only during the Clinton period that the Gini coefficient—the standard measure of inequality—improved. The top five percent did okay, their income going up 15.1 percent, though that was a touch less than for the middle quintile, which gained 16.8 percent. The Reagan period brought a dramatic worsening of these numbers for the middle, second, and bottom quintile, and the George W. Bush years were just terrible for everybody.76

  Had they paid attention to the political periodization, they might have at least speculated as to what policies made such a difference in mitigating or entrenching the problem. Instead, they present these political periods as “business cycles,” without any evident curiosity about the correlation.

  The research did not display data or talk about the top 1 percent. Those heralded top earners do not even get a line in Burkhauser’s graphs. In a Washington Post op-ed, Ron Haskins lists the Democrats’ charges, including that the country is “wracked by inequality,” and miserably fails to explain it away. That “is partly true,” he says, “mostly because those at the top of the income distribution have pulled away from the rest of us.” Well, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?77

  Not having the line for the 1 percent or having examined the political periodization and its implications for policy, senior Atlantic Council fellow Douglas Besharov told a sympathetic interviewer, “No one has the slightest idea what will work. The cupboard is bare.”78

  But the cupboard is hardly bare. The conservative public intellectuals and op-ed writers themselves are enthralled with the Burkhauser recalculations precisely because they take into account the following items: the earned income tax credit; the value of all “public transfers,” including food stamps, welfare, Pell grants, Social Security, and other government-provided cash assistance; and Medicare and Medicaid. Their higher bars that are meant to show how well off is the middle class are really bars showing how government activism can raise incomes and raise people out of poverty.

  Ron Haskins marvels in The Washington Post, “the bottom 20 percent had about 25 percent more income in 2007 than in 1979. Even the bottom is moving up.” Yes, they moved up, though they moved up only under the policies advanced under President Clinton. The income of the bottom quintile rose 23.2 percent during the Clinton-dominated economic period, while growth for these earners was only 0.4 percent under Reagan and 2.2 percent under Bush.79

  Did the conservative economists notice that the Ryan budget decimates food stamps, seeks to eliminate or limit refundable tax credits, caps Pell grants, tries to repeal the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, and aims to privatize Social Security and turn Medicare into a voucher? Did they notice that the leading Republican governors are competing to abolish the state versions of the EITC, slashing food stamps, refusing to expand Medicaid, cutting unemployment benefits, and shifting the cost of higher education onto students? Did they notice while they were cutting taxes for the wealthiest that they raised the tax burden on the poor and the middle class? Of course they noticed, as they are fully paid members of the conservative policy discussion. The truth is they think the decline of the family and the growth of dependence are the real problems facing the country, not the decline of the middle class. Food stamps and tax credits might well “lift the poor out of destitution,” but they simultaneously “discourage the upward mobility of poor children.” Social insurance programs such as unemployment benefits, food stamps, and refundable tax credits are inadequate incentives, if not disincentives, to “work, marriage, and saving.” That does not concern the “left,” these conservatives write, which “does not want to confront the important issues of family instability, criminality, and personal responsibility in limiting life chances.”80

  Liana Fox, Irwin Garfinkel, Neeraj Kaushal, Jane Waldfogel, Christopher Wimer, “Waging War on Poverty: Historical Trends in Poverty Using the Supplemental Poverty Measure,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 19789, January 2014.

  The Republican agenda to address poverty begins with getting the country back to a discussion about values. “There are the deserving poor and the undeserving poor,” according to Bob Woodson, president of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise and adviser to Paul Ryan on poverty. He laments that it “became politically incorrect” to make that distinction, and praises conservatives who are now “returning to some of the old values that served people very effectively until the welfare reforms of the 1960s.”81

  And their poverty agenda goes back to a discussion of big government creating dependence and undermining values. Liberals have grown “the welfare state” and “entitlement state,” and those produced their own revolutionary changes, Nicholas Eberstadt writes in National Affairs. The great American experiment has been corrupted by an “entitlements machine” that has “recast the American family budget over the course of just two generations.” By 2012, over one-third of Americans were on means-tested programs, by his calculation. That is the rub. That number is double the level in 1983 and before the Affordable Care Act began enrolling the uninsured. This growing “mass dependence on entitlements” is “corrosive” because it is associated with the spread of so many pathologies. That portends badly for the country, Eberstadt concludes.82

  In mid-2015, the graph line representing rising public support for the Affordable Care Act crossed the falling line representing the opposition to the new health care law. And then the U.S. Supreme Court in a 6 to 3 decision validated the funding mechanism and rationale for the Act, defeating the last serious challenge to Obamacare. For liberals, that reminded them of the incompleteness of the social safety net and the centrality of health care to struggling families. For conservatives, it is a confirmation of their warnings about growing dependency and what it will mean for the country’s moral fabric.83

  POVERTY AND MARRIAGE

  Conservatives used the fiftieth anniversary of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty to take up the plight of the poor and particularly those living in the inner cities—read, the black and minority citizens at the heart of our metropolitan diversity. In the “The War on Poverty: A Progress Report” hearing of the House Budget Committee, Chairman Paul Ryan asked Eloise Anderson, secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, how SNAP (Supplemental Nut
rition Assistance Program) could be improved, and she shared a touching story: “You know, a little boy told me once that what was important to him is that he didn’t want school lunch, he wanted a brown bag because the brown bag that he brought with his lunch in it meant that his mom cared about him.” That someone else made up the story is less important than the fact that Ryan repeated the story as fact during a speech at CPAC or that the National Review and others reprinted and defended it. Indeed, Ryan’s Budget Committee report on the War on Poverty concluded “perhaps the single most important determinant of poverty is family structure.”84

  America has so many children in poverty, the editors of The National Review argue, because parents are not meeting their responsibilities to their children. Citing genuine scholarship, they write, “Children of single-parent homes, which are overwhelmingly single-mother homes, are not only more likely to be poor but are more likely to stay poor.” It is also true that children living in communities where single-parent households are prevalent are less economically mobile, even if their parents are married. The editors somehow conclude from this that programs “intended to help the poor” end up “mak[ing] the lives of the poor worse in significant ways, mainly by encouraging the long-term dependency that concerns Ryan and others.”85

  Paul Ryan described the “tailspin of culture in our inner cities” that is driving large populations, particularly black men, out of the labor force. The National Review defended his statement and offered the unemployment rates of whites and blacks in cities such as Milwaukee and Detroit as evidence that Ryan was victimized for telling the truth. They elaborated further, saying that most of these young blacks “are born out of wedlock,” and part of a perversely effective system “for producing poverty.”

  “The evidence regarding poverty, single motherhood, and economic mobility … is as close to ‘settled science’ as the social sciences have to offer,” they write. They urge liberal elites to bring the same standard they bring to climate change and prioritize taking action to promote “marriage, work and stability.”

  Progressives need to listen because these changes to the family “have significant social costs,” as Andrew Cherlin described so vividly: “Children face instability and complexity in their home lives, and adults drift away from the institutions that historically have anchored civic life.” Finding ways to reverse these trends could not be more important. In chapter 12, I urge progressives to take up a reform agenda that promotes parenting, a greater role for the church, early childhood education, paid family and sick leave and child care, and higher wages.86

  Conservatives still have trouble getting heard on their social agenda by the new America. Each prospective Republican presidential candidate for 2016 begins with the need to restore traditional marriage as the best antipoverty program. Unfortunately, government programs to encourage and support marriages among those most likely to separate have not been successful, just as programs to promote abstinence before marriage have been ineffective.87

  The public does believe marriage is a good thing and favors policies that encourage it, as long as they do not punish or disadvantage those who are unmarried or in nontraditional relationships, and voters oppose any “marriage penalty” in the tax system. But real unmarried people, working women, and working men are looking pretty desperately for help with child care, paid sick leave, and financial assistance so they can afford skill training and college rather than the offer of a moral ladder leading to marriage.”88

  About half the public supports prioritizing a Republican agenda that responds to the problem of marriage breakdown and unwed mothers with policies that “encourage people to marry, giving them higher tax benefits, and oppose kids being born out of wedlock.” About half the public also acknowledges these problems and instead wants a government agenda that “helps them with child care, paid sick days, and paid family leave.” And it is the unmarried women here who matter the most on this question. When you ask them, twice as many and with intensity say, please, we need help.89

  That the current Republican offer falters when it gets to financial help with child care tells you a lot about today’s Republican Party. The culture war leaves many conservatives cautious about seeming to reward women for working over caring for a child, a symbol of the traditional family that has been lost.

  That blockage is evident in Abby McCloskey’s thoughtful article on conservative policies that could raise incomes for working women and increase their labor force participation. Not surprisingly, she champions lower marginal tax rates and marriage earnings sharing. More surprisingly, she pushes for greatly increasing EITC payments and for higher benefits for single women. And finally, she recommends help with child care—a formidable cost for mothers and a blockage to rejoining the labor market. Gerald Ford signed the Child and Dependent Care Credit in 1976 and President George W. Bush expanded the credit in 2001. So McCloskey puzzles out loud and without answering her own question, “Why aren’t conservatives who are interested in increasing employment taking up the cause of child-care subsidies?”90

  Consider what happened in Britain in 2015. With two weeks before the election and the parties deadlocked in public opinion polls, The Financial Times reported, the Conservative Party prime minister David Cameron visited a nursery school and promised to double the hours of free child care if he got back to Downing Street. With his political life at stake, he did not hesitate to make this critical conservative offer.91

  The central policy debate among conservatives in America, by contrast, is still rooted in the dynamics of the GOP base and a morality that still describes the children of single parents as “born out of wedlock,” without quotation marks, and are shocked to hear “OUT-OF-WEDLOCK BIRTHS ARE THE NEW NORMAL.” They try to spotlight and restore the old normal, highlighting the benefits of maintaining the old sequence: “finish high school, get a job, and get married before having children.” Despite the unmistakable benefits, you cannot get there. The “same secularization of society that allowed stores to be open on Sunday destigmatized out-of-wedlock birth so that the mothers felt free to keep their children.”92

  Thus, conservatives have treaded carefully on government intervening to tilt the balance. They have entertained policies that tax divorce and make tax credits available only to the married. And while Ross Douthat supports these policy changes, he is skeptical that they can succeed without deeper moral pressures: “Social pressure would probably have to become more explicitly moralistic to influence the deeper trends toward non-marital childrearing.”93

  Douthat welcomed Robert Putnam’s new book, Our Kids, because it “recognizes the social crisis among America’s poor and working class” and most important, Putnam “is attuned to culture’s feedback loops.” At a time when the safety net was much thinner, “lower-income Americans found a way to cultivate monogamy, fidelity, sobriety and thrift to an extent that they have not in our richer, higher-spending present.” Putman and I would probably agree with Douthat that “a cultural earthquake that makes society dramatically more permissive” is a big part of the explanation. Putnam and I would also add equality for women and the collapse of the male-breadwinner traditional family as part of the explanation as well. Disingenuously though, Douthat says he is just looking for liberal elites to recognize that “culture shapes behavior,” when what he is really looking for is for them to condemn or judge the moral choices people are making. He says conceding the role of culture “doesn’t require thundering denunciation of the moral choices of the poor.” Instead, “our upper class should be judged first” for its “present ideal of ‘safe’ permissiveness” when working-class families are in so much trouble. In truth, then, Douthat’s policy prescriptions cannot help but depend centrally on moral suasion grounded in a sense of lost virtue.94

  Nearly alone among conservatives after the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, David Brooks urged a radical, yet still pious course. “Put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations from a
ny consideration of religion or belief. Put aside an effort that has been a communications disaster, reducing a rich, complex and beautiful faith into a public obsession with sex. Put aside a culture war that, at least over the near term, you are destined to lose.” Get to work instead mending the social fabric in a country where communities and families are in flux and children in need of help. “Social conservatives could be the people who help reweave the sinews of society,” he writes powerfully.

  That Republicans continue to escalate the culture war is over-determined for now. The Evangelicals and Tea Party are the dominant majority politically in the Republican Party and observant Catholics are battling for their worldview against a modernist pope. And the Republican Party is hardly losing the culture war in the GOP conservative heartland, as you can see in the response of its governors and attorneys general to the Supreme Court decision. Until there is a major political disruption, conservatives will continue their role defending a lost morality.

  That need to moralize and stigmatize, however, makes it very difficult for conservatives to forcefully enter the national policy debate on an issue where new thinking is clearly needed when it comes to achieving more personal responsibility and more responsible parenting and better care for children.

  WHITHER CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY?

  The conservative think tanks, commentators, and newspapers treated the English release of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century as the next fad, the next manufactured attack on the 1 percent, and the next wave of liberal “PC scientific tenets.” They describe an American left that “has worked itself into another one of its frenzies about income inequality.” The reaction might not have reached the level of “Beatlemania,” blogged Scott Winship of the Manhattan Institute and public adviser to Paul Ryan on economic mobility and inequality. But Piketty “has inspired the Washington analog of teenage frenzy,” he wrote, and added with irony that D.C. is home to 28 percent of the nation’s top 1 percent. The reaction to Piketty was like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” among “a certain crowd that is convinced that inequality is a dire economic problem.”95