A teach-in hosted by the UC Berkeley Labor Center Wednesday entitled “Economic Inequality Teach In: Causes, Consequences and Solutions,” featured some of the campus’s prominent economic and political thinkers and social justice activists analyzing the causes and consequences of injustices that continue to exist.
Solutions to growing economic inequality include raising taxes on the wealthy, increasing the income tax subsidy and investing in education starting with early childhood, campus public policy professor and former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich said in his keynote speech.
“There needs to be a political force, movements don’t happen overnight,” Reich said. “People in America suffer from attention deficit movement disorder; we expect everything to happen quickly and if we don’t see something happen in six months we say it is not going to happen, which is not true.”
Reich and the other speakers referenced the Occupy Wall Street movement as an instrument of change.
A mixed crowd of local adults, academics, students and professors attended the teach-in and gave generally positive responses to the keynote speakers’ liberal economic ideas.
In his speech, UC Berkeley economics professor and Director of the Center for Equitable Growth Emmanuel Saez said the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans have increased their income by 58 percent between 1993 to 2010, while the bottom 99 percent has only had an income increase of just over 6 percent in the same period.
When the economy started to recover in 2009-10, the increased profit was captured by the 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent, Saez said.
Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist and deputy chair of the campus Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, gave a presentation called “American Dream: Fraying of the Folklore” that refuted the reality of what she characterized as the chief ideals of the American Dream: “rags to riches,” “meritocracy,” the “free market” and “government not being a solution.”
“The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it,” Allegretto said, quoting author George Carlin.
The American Dream helps create the illusion that inequality is just an economic reality of globalization, argued Paul Pierson, the campus John Gross Professor of Political Science.
“The Tea Party rewards and punishes politicians, you have to shift their incentives and that is where the Occupy movement can learn from the Tea Party movement,” Pierson said.
However, Saez said progressive taxation is necessary to bridge the disparity in income in the United States and in a globalized world will require international coordination. This taxation would only become a reality if citizens are convinced that the exuberant incomes of the 1 percent are detrimental to society, he added.
“Get on this train as it emerges from the station, because it is the most important set of issues that we face in our country today,” Reich said about fighting economic inequality.
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“When the economy started to recover in 2009-10″
What recovery?
These people aren’t even dealing with reality.
Interesting to see the Poli Sci Prof’s attempt to head off any attention to the root of the matter, which is globalization itself (out of the entire pundit-ocracy, only John McLaughlin has managed to cough up a sober realization of this). Go ahead and fiddle with tax rates, if production (and increasingly non-production) jobs keep getting outsourced, domestic fiscal fixes are just spitting in the wind.
I’m sure this same bunch is gushing over “cap and trade” too; meanwhile China is going full-blast building new unfiltered coal-fired plants. Hey the CO2 goes into the same atmosphere, right?
We should be taxing Chinese imports just to reflect the damage they are doing to the environment. Throw this at one these Clinton groupies and watch them sputter. We’re in the mess we’re in because the Democrats followed Bill Clinton like lemmings and passed NAFTA, WTO for China and repealed Glass-Steagal!
Thank you. While increased taxes for the rich won’t directly help the 99%, a solution that addresses the exploitation of the people and the environment by other countries would help so many of the citizens of the US and as a bonus help the exploited in other countries.
I am disappointed about the solutions that were talked about. Saez talks about taxation as a way to reduce inequality, but taking money from the wealthy and giving it to the government doesn’t actually help people with lower incomes. Increase taxes on the wealthy and watch that money just go to pay down the debt or other things that don’t help the low income, while the poor get tuition hikes. Then we get talks about needing affirmative action, which doesn’t focus on people from lower income families, but just focuses on skin color. As the president pointed out, his daughters would benefit from affirmative action while some poor student wouldn’t because they were not the right race. The difference between the Occupy movement and the Tea Party was organization. The Occupy movement didn’t have focused goals, while the Tea Party did, and they could reward or punish politicians who met their focused goals. That is why we still hear about the Tea Party during this election cycle, but the Occupy movement has no influence on the coming election.
The American dream is alive and well, but the speakers didn’t give people solutions that would allow them to achieve the dream. Increasing taxes is not a focused solution toward helping people achieve the American dream.
The speaker isn’t interested in providing solutions. The speaker, like all left-wingers, is only interested in promoting a society of helpless, dependent, and resentful proles that can be manipulated and used as cannon fodder for advancing their agenda.
Great to see so many coming together, from young to old and representing so
many view points, proving that information is power. If everyone does
something every day, from keeping the conversation going, to calling and
writing our government representatives or supporting this movement by walking
with our neighbors and family to the capital to show our committment, to the
99%.
Were you actually trying to get a point across, or merely babbling?
Another event by a political activist group being billed as “news”. And people still doubt that there’s a left-wing political bias @ Cal?
what’s left wing about focusing on the problem of massive inequality? would it be right wing to say there’s no problem, nothing to see here, keep on right along? calling this left wing makes the right wing seem pretty sociopathic.
Of course there is massive inequality. Why do you get to eat three meals a day (if you wish) while millions of children around the world go hungry every day? Why do you get to sit in a classroom or office all day while billions of peasants around the world work in the hot sun? Once you have become equal with those less fortunate than you, THEN worry about those wealthier than you.
Check this out, check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL4FOvIf7G8
Clearly, I am equal with everybody. But this society doesn’t express that so well. So there’s a lot of work to do. We’ll see what happens along the way, but class-suicide won’t necessarily help who I want it to. There might be a lot of good use I can put my privilege to, and honestly I won’t be anything other than white this lifetime so how can I experience what “those less fortunate” than me experience in this racist society?
Things are set up so I can make it just fine, personally, but I better care about what people wealthier than me are doing if I care about anyone who isn’t like me (like 500,000 children starved to death children in Iraq. Madeline Albright: “we think the price was worth it” (yes, that was 1996, but it’s the SAMO skit)).
And by the way, since I won’t really make it just fine if I don’t care about other people (I’ll be miserable and lose my humanity) then I don’t have much choice but to care about those wealthier (the money, the power) than me.
What the bleep do you do? Really, I’m open to ideas.
[like 500,000 children starved to death children in Iraq.]
There’s no proof that half a million children starved to death in Iraq, much less due to American foreign policy. However, there’s plenty of proof that millions HAVE starved to death in Russia, China, North Korea, Zimbabwe, and other places that have adopted the type of Marxist political and economic system that you lefties advocate. Where’s your concern there?
Why is “inequality” such a problem? Let’s see if you can present an argument to back your position, instead of making the assumption that there’s a problem merely because some people have more money than others. Personally, I would rather live in a country where there are people with lots of money who can invest it in new businesses and technologies, as opposed to be in a society where everyone is “equal” but equally impoverished.
Two extremes are not the only options. The choices aren’t massive inequality and everyone in poverty. I’m not calling for everyone to be ‘equally impoverished’… what’s the Gandhi bit: ‘there’s enough for everyone’s need, not everyone’s greed’.
Inequality is a problem and there’s a solution within it: Lately (the last 30 years), the rich got fewer and richer as profits flew to the top. All that money is certainly not in the hands of anyone else. That’s why it’s a problem: because the vast majority of people without money have no power over their lives. The people with the money? Bet your ass they’ve been designing the system in their favor and are after more power and more of the same (This is Romney, this is the Ryan Plan). And everyone else? For one thing, we’re not one homogeneous group: Obama might be colorblind, but I can see who works in the fields, who goes to the good schools. But the further this country goes down the road of greater inequality, what options remain — go work some minimum wage job (after all, profits go to the top) in some industry polluting the future? So in a way, it’s a freedom issue, about livlihood and the American ideal of equality, a fair shot for everybody, not about money as an end to quibble over. This is one angle.
And what’s this idea of people with lots of money who can invest in new businesses? How many boarded up windows do you see with no one starting new businesses, no rich wonderful people showering down their good fortune, as is their good nature, to make jobs for us poor, wretched nerrdowells? Is this some trickle down theory!? Malarky: the most effective trickle down economics I’ve seen is when someone buys a can of soda, tosses out the empty can, and someone else picks it up and calls it 5 cents.
So yeah, inequality is a problem because the existence of a super-rich layer of c.r.e.a.m. at the top means no one else is getting any (money, that is). When regular people have money to spend, access to loans and some kind of protection to be able to take the risk to make a business work, then they can make jobs.
Basically I believe in the capability, resilience, and generosity of regular people. Who do you believe in?
[Two extremes are not the only options.]
Well, there aren’t “two extremes” in this country, so stop pretending they are. But then again, you Occupy types aren’t worried about two extremes, because if you were, you wouldn’t be embracing Marxist economic solutions, which always wind up with exactly that: an economically devastated society with a handful of super-wealthy party officials on top, and the 99% living in poverty at the bottom, a la Cuba, Zimbabwe, and North Korea.
There’s a reason that the genuine “99%” in this country doesn’t support your nonsense. As bad as the current economic situation may be, they realize your stupid little movement of demonizing those who are wealthy and productive isn’t going to make life better for them. If you don’t believe that, why don’t you ask the nearly 1 million Koreans now living in the US why they would prefer to set up some little store in ‘da hood in LA or NY than one in Pyongyang, where the people share the same language and history? It’s because everyone knows that average EBT card holding, Section-8 cribbing, unemployed ghetto denizen in the States STILL has more walking-around money than 99% of the citizens in the North Korea, who probably work a hell of a lot harder and have less to show for it. Even with the bullets, burnings, and Sharptons/Barrys/Farrakhans of the world whipping up racial hatred against them, it’s still better than heading towards one of those Workers Paradises that illustrate the complete FAILURE of your idiotic socialist/marxist/collective mindset.
So you believe in the benevolence of the rich in their self interest? What a joke.
I’m not advocating a Marxist political and economic system. I’m advocating the government invest in people: their health (so quality food, clean water), their education, because life’s better with it, and their business ventures, because this world runs on money so people need money so lets feed the need.
I’m advocating investing in small businesses rather than catering to further corporate growth, which has shown to do much more harm than good. I think it’s great your company is doing well and investing in itself to grow: that’s how companies live and not die. But if it got too big and started to grow to an unhealthy, unsustainable size, that wouldn’t be good anymore.
You were making claims about Cuba, Zimbabwe, and North Korea like they are all one and the same and generalize Marxist economic solutions, which I’m not advocating (and which North Korean politics-society do not at all resemble) as resulting in, ”an economically devastated society with a handful of super-wealthy party officials on top, and the 99% living in poverty at the bottom.”
Really that sounds like where Republicans on the radical right, given the power, would take this country. But they wouldn’t be super-wealthy because they’re party officials, they’d be party officials because they’re super wealthy. Thanks for elucidating that.
[And what's this idea of people with lots of money who can invest in new
businesses?]
It’s called INVESTMENT. It’s the reason that I currently have my job as a senior engineer with a start-up alternative energy technology company, one that is not sucking at the government teat or relying on Obama’s Stimulus money for cash. Our investors actually want to make money, so we’re working on making a product that is actually economically feasible, as opposed to counting on the Feds to subsidize us.
[ How many boarded up windows do you see with no one starting
new businesses]
Rich people sit on their cash if they think that the risks of investing outweigh the potential payoff. That’s why they are rich. They are generally smart with their money, and prefer some type of payback. If the business climate is too hostile, they merely move on. I don’t blame them…