Frozen Grand Central
Citizens for Tax Justice: Who’s Rich?
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.
Computers, Pianos, and Cultural Capital
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.”