One thing I’ve frequently wondered about is why poor and middle-class voters don’t use the power of their numbers to overcome the upper class’s power of money. Why wouldn’t the lower 80% of the wealth scale favor public officials and policies that would redistribute wealth from the top 20%? The recent showdown over the debt ceiling has been the most recent event to focus my thoughts on the question. President Obama and the Democratic Party have been pushing for a solution based on “shared sacrifice,†while the Republican Party has refused to consider plans that would require the public to make a greater contribution to paying for public services. A number of polls suggest that voters generally support the former position, but that polling support hasn’t translated to voters electing representatives who share that belief. Why doesn’t “shared sacrifice†create the same passion as “no new taxes?â€
You could say that it’s because no one wants to pay more taxes, but I’m assuming here that if they wanted to, that bottom 80% could elect enough people to make sure that any tax changes would only affect the top 20 (or less). Whether it would be right or not, the majority should be able to soak the minority. So why don’t they?
I think that one reason is that the notion of shared sacrifice is a double-edged sword. Within domestic American politics, there’s a clear gap between haves and have-nots. There’s a gap between the wealthy and the rest of the population, and that gap is growing. But if you broaden out to a global perspective, suddenly many of the have-nots turn into haves. In the 1990s, the global poverty line was considered to be earning one American dollar a day. If you made $367 in a year, you were above the line. The World Bank seems to have updated the figure to $1.25, so let’s say that $500 would put you over these days. According to one report, someone in the bottom 5% of income-earners in America makes as much money as someone in the top 5% in India. This map from National Geographic shows how income is distributed around the world, and it should be pretty clear that a lot of that wealth is in America.
I think that, at a gut level, many Americans realize this. They understand why so many jobs are being outsourced overseas – there are so many people who are so much poorer than we are that it is almost inevitable that they will be able to offer their labor for lower wages. They understand why so many people try to make their way into this country – even a difficult life here can lead to a higher standard of living than it is possible to achieve in many other countries. So, if you agree with the notion that a majority of have-nots should redistribute wealth and income from a minority of haves in America, you will at least have acknowledge that a majority of have-nots around the world have a good case for redistributing wealth and income from the minority of global haves. And all of a sudden the American poor and middle class find themselves on the opposite side of the redistribution argument.
I honestly don’t know if there’s any way around this. I don’t know if there’s a way for this nation of 300 million to maintain its standard of living without subjecting billions of people around the world to lives of poverty and suffering. I hope there is, but I don’t know if we’re ready to face up to the question yet. People tend to be more passionate about protecting what they have than about gaining something in the future. If Matt Yglesias is right in this post about Globalization and the Progressive Dilemma, the Democratic Party is going to have a tough time generating support for any call for sacrifice in the future.