Stolen Society

"Too few Americans are saving for their own retirement. ... Savings, of course, is about more than protecting what you have, it's about creating and building greater wealth for a better future. With [private] accounts, working families will have a chance to invest just as wealthier families do today."

– William Jefferson Clinton, April, 1999

The Republicans' Ownership Society has gotten plenty of ink, but few have noted that it – like many of the right's messages – originated on the left and was subverted by movement conservatives.

Twice during Clinton's second term, he proposed adding USA Accounts – private IRAs that the government would subsidize with fully refundable tax credits – to our retirement system. "Universal Savings Accounts," he argued, "do just what the name says, they make savings universal ... And by rewarding responsibility, USA Accounts would help set [working people] on the road to further savings."

Of course, the Clinton plan was savaged by the very same think-tanks that are now quarterbacking the right's Ownership Society. They want transfers from the public sector to the private – trimming entitlements along the way – while Clinton wanted to add private accounts as part of a bargain with the right.

Clinton's plan wasn't a new idea for the left. Michael Sherraden, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, first proposed using private accounts to build assets among the poor in his seminal 1992 book Assets and the Poor: A New American Welfare Policy.

Since then, the idea of spreading ownership around has been reiterated many times. Gene Sperling, whom Clinton called the "MVP" of his economic advisors, has kept at the USA Account idea, now with the Center for American Progress.

Ray Boshara, director of the Asset Building Program at the New America Foundation, has an even bolder approach; he'd give every baby born in America $6,000 dollars in an American Stakeholder Account, which would grow to be used for asset-building expenses like buying a first home or paying for college. Anything left over would go towards retirement.

Others have suggested using microcredits and community-based development accounts for small businesses, helping with first home purchases and selling off public low-income housing to residents for next to nothing.

Those are but a few of the dozens of initiatives out there that might create a progressive ownership society. The left's proposals address the kernel of truth behind the right's rhetoric: asset ownership is a darn good thing. But its concentration is approaching a crisis point in this country. And while progressives get into a lather – rightly so – about income inequality, it pales in comparison to wealth inequality; it's why "upward mobility" has largely become a myth in America – a fond remembrance of another age.

The ugly truth is that your parents' wealth is the single greatest predictor of your lifetime success – forget about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. As Dalton Conley, Director of NYU's Center for Advanced Social Science Research and author of Being Black, Living in the Red, told me, "When you look at how similar parents and children are on a variety of economic or social measures like education level, or what job they hold, the similarity in terms of wealth is greater. Wealth very manifestly displays the anti-meritocracy in America – the reproduction of social class without the inheritance of any innate ability." See Bush, George W.

But while the left has been talking about this for some time, it took the conservative message machine to frame the issue of asset inequality in an accessible way. They threw in a few looming financial crises and then crafted "solutions" according to their ideology – by trying to privatize great swaths of the public sector.