America has a serious “We” problem — as in “Why should we pay for them?”
The
question is popping up all over the place. It underlies the debate over
extending unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed and
providing food stamps to the poor.
It’s found in the resistance of
some young and healthy people to being required to buy health insurance
in order to help pay for people with preexisting health problems.
It
can be heard among the residents of upscale neighborhoods who don’t
want their tax dollars going to the inhabitants of poorer neighborhoods
nearby.
The pronouns “we” and “they” are the most important of all
political words. They demarcate who’s within the sphere of mutual
responsibility, and who’s not. Someone within that sphere who’s needy is
one of “us” — an extension of our family, friends, community, tribe –
and deserving of help. But needy people outside that sphere are “them,”
presumed undeserving unless proved otherwise.
The central
political question faced by any nation or group is where the borders of
this sphere of mutual responsibility are drawn.
Why in recent years have so many middle-class and wealthy Americans pulled the borders in closer?
The
middle-class and wealthy citizens of East Baton Rouge Parish,
Louisiana, for example, are trying to secede from the school district
they now share with poorer residents of town, and set up their
own district funded by property taxes from their higher-valued homes.
Similar
efforts are underway in Memphis, Atlanta, and Dallas. Over the past two
years, two wealthy suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, have left the
countywide school system in order to set up their own.
Elsewhere,
upscale school districts are voting down state plans to raise their
taxes in order to provide more money to poor districts, as they did
recently in Colorado.
“Why should we pay for them?” is also
reverberating in wealthy places like Oakland County,
Michigan, that
border devastatingly poor places like Detroit.
“Now, all of a sudden, they’re having problems and they want to give part of the responsibility to the suburbs?”
says L. Brooks Paterson, the Oakland County executive. “They’re not gonna talk me into being the good guy. ‘Pick up your share?’ Ha ha.”
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But
had the official boundary been drawn differently so that it encompassed
both Oakland County and Detroit – say, to create a Greater Detroit
region – the two places would form a “we” whose problems Oakland’s more
affluent citizens would have some responsibility to address.
What’s going on?
One
obvious explanation involves race. Detroit is mostly black; Oakland
County, mostly white. The secessionist school districts in the South are
almost entirely white; the neighborhoods they’re leaving behind, mostly
black.
But racisim has been with us from the start. Although some
southern school districts are seceding in the wake of the ending of
court-ordered desegregation, race alone can’t explain the broader
national pattern. According to Census Bureau numbers,
two-thirds of Americans below the poverty line at any given point identify themselves as white.
Another
culprit is the increasing economic stress felt by most middle-class
Americans. Median household incomes are dropping and over three-quarters
of Americans report they’re living paycheck to paycheck.
It’s
easier to be generous and expansive about the sphere of ”we” when
incomes are rising and future prospects seem even better, as during the
first three decades after World War II when America declared war on
poverty and expanded civil rights. But since the late 1970s, as most
paychecks have flattened or declined, adjusted for inflation, many in
the stressed middle no longer want to pay for “them.”
Yet this
doesn’t explain why so many wealthy America’s are also exiting. They’ve
never been richer. Surely they can afford a larger “we.” But most of
today’s rich adamantly refuse to pay anything close to the tax rate
America’s wealthy accepted forty years ago.
Perhaps it’s because,
as inequality has widened and class divisions have hardened, America’s
wealthy no longer have any idea how the other half lives.
Being
rich in today’s America means not having to come across anyone who
isn’t. Exclusive prep schools, elite colleges, private jets, gated
communities, tony resorts, symphony halls and opera houses, and vacation
homes in the Hamptons and other exclusive vacation sites all insulate
them from the rabble.
America’s wealthy increasingly inhabit a
different country from the one “they” inhabit, and America’s less
fortunate seem as foreign as do the needy inhabitants of another
country.
The first step in widening the sphere of “we” is to break
down the barriers — not just of race, but also, increasingly, of class,
and of geographical segregation by income — that are pushing “we
Americans” further and further apart.
Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work
and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the
Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at
Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently
as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has
named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last
century. He has written 13 books, including his latest best-seller,
“Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future;” “The Work of
Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages; and his newest,
an e-book, “Beyond Outrage.” His syndicated columns, television
appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each
week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine,
and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His new movie
"Inequality for All" is in Theaters. His widely-read blog can be found
at
.
Robert Reich 
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