5. Right to Education, Housing, and Health Care
To help give every child a chance and to foster young talent and innovation, America should guarantee the right to public education of equal high quality from preschool through college. We should have a right to decent, safe, sanitary and affordable housing. We should have a right to health care of equal high quality. These are things that ought not to be privileges for the wealthy but things to which we all have adequate access, in other words: rights.
6. Worker Rights
7. Right to Basic Welfare
I would like to offer two additional proposals that might be somewhat controversial, one ensuring the basic welfare (food and shelter) of each individual whether or not employed and working, the other ensuring some limitation on the division of society into an overclass of superwealthy families and everyone else.
The basic income guarantee, or BIG as it's known to the activists and academics who make up the US Basic Income Guarantee Network, is a government-ensured guarantee that no one's income will fall below the level necessary to meet their most basic needs for any reason, even if they are not working and earning the living wage that I (but not all supporters of a BIG) would also mandate.
How would a basic income guarantee work? Each month, every adult would receive a check from the government for the exact same amount. These checks, notes the Citizen Policies Institute, would be "large enough to meet basic costs of food and shelter . . . but not so large as to undermine incentives to work, earn, save, and invest." Some checks would be wasted on awesomely affluent Americans who have absolutely no financial worries. But there would be no need for a bureaucracy to determine who should receive the checks, and no stigma would attach to receiving them. That some small percentage of people would not work cannot be considered a fatal flaw in the BIG idea, not in a country where we already have a significant percentage of people not working, including those unable to work, those with no need to work and no desire to, those searching for work, those who have given up on searching for work, those who have calculated that they would spend more on childcare than they would earn if they took a job, those who are behind bars as a result of crimes that tend to increase with unemployment and poverty, and those working part-time who want full-time jobs. There are also many working full-time or more who would prefer to work part-time and train for other work if they could afford to. Surely anyone's displeasure with people receiving a basic income without working should not outweigh their displeasure with the current state of affairs in which tens of millions of Americans, including children, live in poverty. The Paulson's Plunder "bailouts" gave away, to some very wealthy people, far more money than would be required for a BIG, so perhaps it's best to think of a BIG as a real bailout for everyone, one that would actually stimulate the economy.
The past thirty years have seen tremendous growth in the United States in productivity and wealth, and yet we don't all seem very appreciative. In fact, as Yale political scientist Robert Lane has documented, surveys have found Americans' assessment of their level of happiness declining significantly. The United States contains 4.5 percent of the world's population and spends 42 percent of the world's health care expenses, and yet Americans are less healthy than the residents of nearly every other wealthy nation and a few poor ones as well, as documented by Dr. Stephen Bezruchka of the University of Washington. What's going on? We spend more on criminal justice and have more crime. How can that be? We're richer and have more poverty. Why is that?
Labor journalist Sam Pizzigati thinks he has a solution to these riddles. In his book, "Greed and Good," Pizzigati focuses on the extreme increase in inequality that the United States has seen over the past generation. The Federal Reserve Board has documented gains by America's wealthiest 1 percent of more than $2 trillion more than everyone in America's bottom 90 percent combined. We are now the most unequal wealthy nation on earth, and have reversed the relationship we had to Europe when the founders of this country rejected aristocracy. Today Europeans come to the United States to marvel at the excesses of wealth beside shameful poverty. Perhaps it's time for a right to some minimal level of equality.
Many of us would like to lift up those at the bottom. Few of us want to bring down those at the top. Pizzigati argues that you cannot do one without the other, because the super-wealthy will always have the political power to avoid contributing to bringing the bottom up. This will leave it to the middle class to assist those less fortunate, even as their own situations are slipping and their concept of success--based on the lifestyles of the CEO-barons -- is being driven further out of reach. The middle class won't want to do this, and instead will support policies that benefit the super-wealthy.
But the existence of the super-wealthy, Pizzigati argues, has a long list of negative impacts on all of our lives. Get rid of vast concentrations of wealth, and all sorts of things happen, including lower murder rates, lower blood pressure, and lower housing prices. Research suggests that when people see their situations improving over time, and when they see their situations as acceptable by the standard of those around them, they tend to be happy. The United States had this in the 1950s and 1960s, a period when working families prospered and income over $200,000 was taxed at roughly 90 percent.
Developed societies with the healthiest and longest living people, extensive research shows, are not those with the highest average wealth, but those with the greatest equality of wealth. Explanations for this fact vary from consideration of the levels of stress caused by economic insecurity to the focusing of health care on plastic surgery and other luxuries at the expense of treatment of actual illnesses. Research also shows that a country's murder rate varies with its inequality, not its overall wealth or its criminal justice spending.
Pizzigati proposes a new system of income tax that would lower taxes on 99 percent of Americans and allow the wealthiest 1 percent to lower their taxes by lobbying to raise the minimum wage. This system would ensure a living wage and a maximum wage as well. If your household brought in less than the income of two full-time minimum wage workers, you would pay no income tax. Above that level you would pay 1 percent. Above twice the minimum wage you would pay 2 percent. And so on up to 10 percent. Any income above ten times the minimum would be taxed at 100 percent. If those with high incomes wanted less of it taxed, all they would need to do would be to lobby Congress to raise the minimum wage.
This would mean significantly lower taxes on 99 percent of us. It would also mean an economy focused on products for a once-again expanding middle class, rather than our new aristocracy. The maximum wage proposal will almost certainly be attacked as being supposedly motivated by a desire to punish successful people (as if restricting someone to ten times the minimum wage is punishment, but the minimum wage itself is not). However, I favor a maximum wage for the simple reason that a democratic republic cannot survive with an aristocracy. My thought here is also a very American way of thinking and by no means new, but I'm afraid it is not nearly as widespread as is support for revenge and belief that revenge is everywhere.
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