Citizens for Tax Justice: Who’s Rich?

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Several Presidential candidates have proposed allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for wealthy Americans. For Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, “wealthy” means those with income above $250,000, while for former Senator John Edwards, this means those who make more than $200,000. These thresholds have caused some consternation among the people in the media and plugged into politics. Some progressive activists have asked why in the world people with incomes as high as $200,000 need to keep the tax cuts President Bush enacted for them when basic needs like healthcare for children aren’t being met. On the other hand, many in the media seem to think that people in the $200,000 –250,000 income range are solidly middle-class and deserve every tax break they have ever received.

“Who’s Rich,” Citizens for Tax Justice, January 16, 2008

Americans, as bell hooks famously observed, never really talk about class, particular in relation to education. It’s as though we suffer a kind of democratic self-delusion that because anyone can (theoretically) go to college all of our problems have been solved. Practically speaking, of course, things never quite work out that way.

Now that the presidential race is substantially settled it’s time to start pushing the counter-arguments and facts. On one side is going to be Obama or Clinton or some combination. Either way their economic policies are largely identical. On the other will be McCain, probably accompanied by some far-right leaning vice president. He’s only a hair more progressive than Bush.

Whatever the particular grouping, as Citizens for Tax Justice has shown, the campaign has thus far been based on some powerful misconceptions about the realities of American society. Edwards put poverty on the agenda, but he did not manage to counter our ignorance about class.

In fact, people with incomes above $250,000 or even $200,000 comprise less than 3% of the U.S. population. That hardly seems middle-class. “By state,” CTJ’s report goes on to say, “the percentage of taxpayers with AGI above $200,000 ranges from a high of 6 percent in Connecticut and Washington, D.C. down to only 1.3 percent in West Virginia.”

CTJ goes to list several plausible reasons why this self-delusion persists. For one thing, people “who influence the political discourse… tend to live in or around cities where incomes and the cost of living are higher.” These people, too, are likely to be “highly educated people who come from wealthier families.” The wealthy cluster in particular regions, too, usually close to water or mountains.

Interesting, CTJ also that these misguided ideas about class persist even if candidates talk about percentages. “A Time Magazine poll in 2000,” they note, “found that 19 percent of those surveyed believed themselves to be among the richest 1 percent of Americans.”

CTJ, of course, wants to fight these ideas with better information that is more widely distributed. It’s hard to disagree. Some of the these numbers are amazing, once converted into everyday figures. If you were single and made your way to the top 1%, for example, you would have to earn “an average wage of $224 an hour.”

To become an average member of the top 1%, you would have to made $722 an hour; if you a “two-earner couple” each of you would have to make $112 an hour to make it into the top 1% and $361 an hour to become an average member.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Online Places, Writing

Computers, Pianos, and Cultural Capital

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Along with standardized testing and back-to-basics reforms, computers have contributed to the trivializing of the content of the curriculum and the work of teachers in ensuring the quality of the substance of schooling. We need to examine current digital pedagogy in terms of unarticulated and implicit models of labor and the job prospects that students, parents, and teachers imagine computer skills will lead them to. There are clear benefits that access to technology can bring to disheartened and disenfranchised student populations. Computers can be a hook to do more sustained academic work for working-class students of color. Yet, the process of education cannot be made more cost effective through technology, and computers cannot teacher-proof the classroom. The enthusiasm among school board members and local business communities for high technology in public education was based on a desire to teacher-proof the classroom.

Practicing at Home: Computers, Pianos, and Cultural Capital, Ellen Seiter

As an online teacher, I’ve long been interested in the too-rarely noted connections among proprietary education, computer technology, and the rise of adjunct labor, particularly in composition. Corporations alway use technology to disrupt worker organization, of course, as the current writer’s strike illustrates. It’s not surprising, then, that the same thing has been happening even among the privileged halls of academia.

Seiter uses an unlikely but effective analogy with the history of the piano to emphasize one of the ironies of teaching with computers that recalls the now dashed hope for the paperless office: “Teaching with computers requires a smaller teacher-to-student ratio than conventional classrooms.” And, as she notes, now that the dot-com boom is a distant memory– and the recession looming– it is working class and poor districts that are least able to provide the low ratios or maintain equipment.

So computers further evolve into an effective tool for class management, in the economic as well as the pedagogic sense. Seiter goes on to list several other reasons why, as she says, it’s so difficult for working-class students to achieve that “cool job” in new media. Among the main reasons she includes “a reliance on public computers, a lack of access to “prestigious educational credentials,” as well to “the social networks crucial to employment in the “new” economy.”

In a strong sense, the dot-com boom in higher education has lasted nearly a decade longer than the speculative economic bubble which burst in the late 1990s. Administrators, though, seem to realize that while a teacherless classroom was unlikely, computers could be introduced alongside an increased reliance on adjuncts and graduate students. It’s not as cheap as automation, but its much cheaper than using full professors. The close fit between these two impulses is still not well understood.

Seiter’s research represents an important step in the ongoing deflation of the idea that the mere presence of computers can ameliorate the injustices of class. “The time for technological utopianism is past,” she writes, and the use of technology in the schools has to be rethought, “in the context of a realistic assessment of the labor market and widening class divides, struggles for fair employment in both technology industries and other job sectors, and the pressing need to empower students as citizens who can participate actively in a democracy.”

Posted in: Composition, Economics, Language, Professional, Writing

Obama’s Deceptions

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With all the talk about how to stimulate it, you’d think that the economy is a giant clitoris. Ben Bernanke may not employ this imagery, but the immediate challenge–and the issue bound to replace Iraq and immigration in the presidential race–is how best to get the economy engorged and throbbing again.

It would be irresponsible to say much about Bush’s stimulus plan, the mere mention of which could be enough to send the Nikkei, the DAX, and the curiously named FTSE and Sensex tumbling into the crash zone again. In a typically regressive gesture, Bush proposed to hand out cash tax rebates–except to families earning less than $40,000 a year. This may qualify as an example of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism,” in which any misfortune can be re-jiggered to the advantage of the affluent.

Barbara Ehrenreich, January 22, 2008

On positions from Iraq to health care, the policy differences between Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama are minute. Much of the debate between them has involved making these molehills look mountainous or clashing over who-shifted-when.

The one most significant difference between them can be found in how they would approach the presidency – and how the nation might respond.

Hillary Clinton has been a policy wonk most of her life, a trait she has carried into the U.S. Senate. As her debate performances have shown, she has intelligence and a deep understanding of many issues. Her efforts in New York focused first on learning her adopted state’s issues in detail, and pursuing legislation that would not necessarily grab headlines.

But we also have a good idea what a Clinton presidency would look like. The restoration of the Clintons to the White House would trigger a new wave of all-out political warfare.

The State’s Endorsement of Barack Obama, January 22, 2008

It’s become a kind of cliché that the national media first develops a narrative around every presidential race and then pursues that story at any cost. The outlines of the story are becoming increasingly clear. Edwards is angry and so ineffective. The Clintons are self-serving and divisive. Obama is the peace maker.

The New York Times has endorsed Clinton, so maybe the narrative is not yet fixed. On the other hand, she’s a popular New York Senator, so that’s an predictable exception. What bugs me about Obama is that, as someone like Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us, his rhetoric is more deceptive than substantively progressive.

The Clintons, again as the cliché goes, are wonks and they don’t pretend to be otherwise. They are selling expertise and experience. Edwards is selling a fight that is logically unavoidable. Obama, though, is selling the false idea that progressive policies can be enacted without fundamentally challenging any of the powers-that-be.

The rhetoric of his supporters is telling. “From terrorism and climate change to runaway federal entitlement spending, there are big challenges to be faced,” The Sun endorsement begins (as quoted on Obama’s website), as if all of these things were part of a single syndrome.

“Terror” in this case refers to a kind of rhetorical trick pulled by Republicans to justify what can only be called criminal behavior on their part. “Runaway federal entitlement spending,” is more Republican code for the ongoing decimation of public services. “Climate change” seems to mean corn-ethanol and legalized price gouging. It’s hard to figure what this ‘peace’ is supposed to be, even rhetorically.

Posted in: Economics, Language, War, Writing

Class Tells

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One of the many things we find hard to talk about — not only here in Princeton, but nationally — is class. That helps to explain why we do such a bad job when we try to talk about the social mission of elite universities. Take Drew Faust — the excellent historian who recently became president of Harvard. As a scholar and a writer, Faust uses words with great skill and care — so well that her most recent book was published by Alfred Knopf in New York, one of the few remaining bastions of quality in the trade. But when Harvard announced its new financial aid policy, aimed at students whose families earn between $120,000 and $180,000 a year, President Faust declared that by showing that higher education remains an “engine of opportunity,” it would help a “middle-income group.” In this case, her language was not its usual crisp and accurate self — and the fault is not hers alone, but one shared with most members of the chattering classes.

Anthony Grafton, The Daily Princetonian

In a sense this is pretty-self explanatory. You can also use ZipCodeStatistics to verify that the median income of Princeton, New Jersey, is $90,000. Just as Grafton suggests, in this sector of education, people who make $100,000 are ‘middle class.’

They are also 77% white, 4.3% Hispanic/Latin, 11.3% Asian and 1.8% ‘multiracial’ More than 70% of the population has either a bachelor’s degree or is a graduate from a graduate or professional program. Not a representative bunch at all.

In fact, Grafton estimates that the new program is geared towards people wealthier than “95 percent or 96 percent of American households.” Why focus on the ‘chattering classes’– aka the media? Not that the media covers these sorts of issues well.

It would nice, though, if more precise language were used, as Grafton suggests, and these programs were described as aid for the wealthy. It would be even nicer if Historians of Grafton’s stature began to question the entire superstructure of material and social privilege on which institutions like Princeton rests.

Posted in: Composition, Language, Professional, Writing