How to Save the Middle Class from Extinction

By Paul Krugman, AlterNet. Posted March 9, 2007.

The following is excerpted from the keynote speech delivered by Paul Krugman at the Economic Policy Institute's recent conference on The Agenda for Shared Prosperity.

...One thing I've been noticing on multiple debates in public policies -- climate change is another one -- is there seems to be an almost seamless transition from denial to fatalism. That for 15 or 20 years the people would say, "No, what you're saying is not happening." And then almost immediately they'll turn around and say, "Well, yeah, sure it's happening, but there's nothing that can be done about it."

And that's kind of the way a lot of the discussion now goes on inequality. That there is really nothing you can do to arrest this. That it's all the invisible hand driving this growth in inequality, and there's nothing you can do to really change it -- well, maybe better education. But while education is very much a good thing, it's the all-American way of dodging problems. Since everybody approves of it, you say we should have better education but wave away the pretty strong evidence that while it's a good thing, it won't make very much difference. So there's this general sense that you can't do anything.

And I don't think that that's what the historical record suggests. That in fact when we look at it, there appears to be quite a lot that the political process can do about inequality. Just to say, there's the obvious. Obviously, even if you look at the United States right now, the tax and social insurance system makes an enormous difference.

But the amount of inequality in the United States is substantially less than it would be if we did not have still at least somewhat progressive taxation, and still a pretty extensive, though not nearly extensive enough, system of social insurance. And that makes a big difference. Certainly if you're looking at say the United States versus Canada, a lot of the difference between the two countries is just that Canada has more of a better safety net financed by somewhat higher taxation.

And if you're looking for a progressive agenda, certainly from my point of view, a large part of that ought to be straightforward orthodox stuff, which is still very hard to do politically. It would be essentially restoring progressivity of the tax system, and using the revenue to improve social insurance and, above all, health care.

So, if you say what would I really like if I went into a Rip Van Winkle sleep and woke up ten years from now, I'd like to wake up and discover that we have a national health care in some version with the necessary funding supplied in part by higher taxes on me, or actually, the top two percent of the income distribution. But people a lot richer than me, of course. But it's not the whole story that the only thing you can do is taxes and social insurance. And the arc of history for the United States suggests that there's actually a lot more that can happen.

If you look back across the past 80 years or so of the United States, what you see is that in the 1920s, we were for practical purposes still in the gilded age. That may not be the way the historians cut it, but in terms of the actual distribution of income, so far as we can measure it in terms of the role of status and general feel of the society, we were still an extremely unequal royalist society.

By the time World War II was over, we had become the middle-class society that the baby boomers in this audience grew up in. We had become a much more equal society. That high degree of equality began to go away -- depending on exactly which numbers you look at -- during the late 70's, maybe a little earlier than that. And at this point we're basically back to pre-tax and transfer to the levels of inequality that we had in 1929.

So there is this great arc to the middle class, away from gilded age to middle-class society and then back to the new gilded age, which is now what we're living in. And there are really two puzzles about that. One of them is a political puzzle, which is why instead of leaning against these trends, politics has actually reinforced them. Why it is that U.S. politics moved left in the age of a relatively middle-class society, and moved right as society got more unequal?

A naïve view of politics would say that, "Gee, when a few people are winning a lot and most people are lagging behind, people ought to be voting for more social insurance and more progressive taxation, not less." And we have some understanding of why that doesn't happen. It has to do with the role of money, organization and all of these other things that affect politics. That story also helps us understand why politics gets so nasty.

If you actually look at some of the measures -- I'm really into quantitative political science these days -- of political positions that political scientists calculate, it does look as if what the main thing that moves actually over time is in fact the Republican party. The Democratic Party has not -- at least with northern Democrats -- gotten significantly more liberal over the past. They haven't moved much at all over the past 30 years.

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