republicans and the myth of upward mobility

[xchrom]

http://www.nationofchange.org/republicans-and-myth-upward-mobility-1329412132

In the months lead­ing into the Re­pub­li­can pri­mary a major agenda item among con­ser­v­a­tives has been the pro­tec­tion of cur­rent tax rates for the wealth­i­est tier of Amer­i­cans. This is not sur­pris­ing if you con­sider that Re­pub­li­can pres­i­den­tial pri­mary front-run­ner Mitt Rom­ney is, him­self, the prod­uct of mas­sive gen­er­a­tional wealth trans­fer. The sur­pris­ing thing has been how ef­fec­tively the right has sold strug­gling mid­dle class vot­ers on the no­tion that all Amer­i­cans have equal foot­ing when at­tempt­ing to climb the eco­nomic lad­der.

The idea is so strong that even the pop­u­lar media isn’t ex­empt from as­pects of this nar­ra­tive. For ex­am­ple, the rags to riches suc­cess story of Face­book CEO Mark Zucker­berg, pop­u­lar­ized by the film “The So­cial Net­work”, con­ve­niently glosses over the fact that the heroic un­der­dog of Har­vard hails from an af­flu­ent fam­ily of North East doc­tors; not nearly as rich as the film’s an­tag­o­nis­tic foils the Win­klevoss twins, but far wealth­ier than a large ma­jor­ity of Amer­i­can fam­i­lies.

The premise of up­ward mo­bil­ity in Amer­ica is based upon ed­u­ca­tion and hard work being the two great­est fac­tors in fi­nan­cial achieve­ment. If I study hard and am will­ing to put in as much time as pos­si­ble to­ward my job I will be re­warded with fi­nan­cial health. This be­lief is sim­ply no longer true. State­ments like Florida Sen­a­tor Marco Rubio’s, “The re­sult is an Amer­ica which is the only place in the world where it doesn’t mat­ter who your par­ents were or where you came from; you can be any­thing you are will­ing to work hard to be,” are now sta­tis­ti­cal anom­alies.

A re­cent ar­ti­cle by Walt Gard­ner of Ed­u­ca­tion Week, en­ti­tled “Poli­cies Trump School­ing in Up­ward Mo­bil­ity” states:

“In 2008, when 29.4 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion held a col­lege de­gree, the bot­tom 90 per­cent got less than 52 per­cent of the na­tional in­come, ac­cord­ing to the Na­tional Cen­ter for Ed­u­ca­tional Sta­tis­tics. But in 1970, when only 11 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion had a de­gree, the bot­tom 90 per­cent got 67 per­cent of the na­tional in­come.”

[lumberjack_jeff]

1. Here's the thing, Republicans. You can't have it both ways.

We're either a country in which "it doesn't matter how much wealth your parents had" OR we're a country in which "People should not be punished because they work hard, become successful and want to pass on the fruits of their labor, or even their ancestors' labor, to their children."