For all the talk of scandal regarding the IRS targeting groups named “Tea Party” or “Patriot,” it’s not hard to draw an additional lesson from the facts of the case — a pattern that follows the well-worn model of the modern political age: Benefits flow to the rich and the well-connected, with pain for the rest.
Just how bad is the state of public defense in America? The charts below detail some of the biggest challenges plaguing the system.
The ongoing organizing effort of fast-food workers has highlighted the highly exploitative conditions faced by those at the deep fryers and cash registers of America’s most profitable fast food outlets, which include Burger King, McDonald’s, Dominos, Pizza Hut and KFC. The actions and considerable media attention has also begun to chip away at the conventional image of a fast-food worker as someone who bears her servitude with a youthful grin.
The average black household that experienced unemployment had zero cash to fall back on. The history of our latest economic recession is full of stories of families who had to cash out their retirement accounts or savings for a child's education to make regular payments on rent and bills. But what about families that didn't even have those options?
A host of indicators show that the middle class is struggling-and worse, shrinking-and that upward mobility is elusive for many Americans. Meanwhile, evidence abounds that the U.S. political system is increasingly dominated by wealthy interests . . . What is less understood, though, is the interplay between these two problems-the way that a tilting of political life toward business and the wealthy has served to undermine economic mobility.
The cascade of trauma center closures around the country epitomizes the challenges to combating healthcare inequities in a for-profit system. In the absence of federal or state regulations mandating the availability of trauma care, hospitals in high poverty areas have found that simply closing their trauma units improves their bottom line.
These regional disparities go back to Reconstruction, when Southern Republicans increased property taxes on defeated white landowners and former slaveholders to pay for the first public services — education, hospitals, roads — ever provided to black citizens. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, conservative Democrats — popularly labeled “the Redeemers” — rolled taxes back to their prewar levels and inserted supermajority clauses into state constitutions.
Obama needs to do something that doesn't come easily to him. He needs to demolish the previous terms of debate, some of them partly of his own making - he needs to disavow earlier mistaken policies that he embraced. Otherwise he will preside over the worst eight-year economic record of any Democratic president, and the steepest rate of decline in social spending. He will leave an economy even more unequal than he inherited. He needs to find the audacity to restore hope
Five lessons for progressives from our first century of income taxes.
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