BRAND NEW BEGINNINGS

 Beginnings are always messy. ~ John Galsworthy 

Greetings from the very near future – 1/21/21, only 21 days from now, and a world apart from yesterday.

Let me introduce myself. I’m Lefty Solomon, outside the newly-occupied White House, with Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (aka, Joe), in residence as our 46th president of the United States. Hooray! I’m loosely connected with several very liberal groups like Progressive Majority and People’s Action.

Actually, I came here yesterday, Jan. 20th, hoping to see #45 slunk southward to Palm Beach, but alas he must have cowardly used Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak and disappeared like a faux, manic King Lear. No surprise at all, really.

Because on last November 3rd we helped President Biden be able to move into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue yesterday, strongly Liberal Progressives (SLPs) want Joe to initiate big changes without delay. For example, it’s way beyond time for all of us to adopt pandemic-induced social re-arrangements and priorities to assist the oppressed.

Starting with SLPs, we will all adopt universal immigrant status. The president should mandate everyone to do so as well. We’re all immigrants; at some point in the recent or deeper past, everyone’s ancestors came from another country (even Native-Americans way, way, way long ago who likely came from Asia). Such immigrant-status is positively crucial (see this story) for all to adopt so we can better see the world as filled with prejudice that must be slayed ASAP.

Likewise, “privileged” and “elite” status should become woebegone negatives. If your background or foreground involves being connected with at least “upper middle-class”, this status should be tentative. Upper middle class includes people whose earned income roughly exceeds $107,000. Remember, over 80% of Americans have called themselves “middle class.” Upper middle-class folks are about 15% of the population. Privileged, elite status should be quickly discharged.

Is it time to cancel all facets of inequality? We certainly think so. I present 33 “flavors” of inequality below that NYTimesters and other compatriots in the media have identified. This list is not meant to be all-inclusive. These facets of inequality include the old standbys of income and wealth disparity, as well as the environmental inequality of wild fires, inequities faced by being left-handed and discriminated farmers of color.

Strongly Liberal Progressives believe former privileged folks must mythologize their past far more adeptly. Therapy may help. They should perhaps consider themselves as children of hard-working, underpaid single-mothers joining with newly-adopted immigrants to rectify our inequality-filled world. Feels totally different, right? That’s a step in the right (or is it left) direction.

Time is of the essence, which raises two questions. Where are our not already-tainted “non-elites,” that we soooo desperately need to run the nation in a totally equitable fashion? And how will we get to true Total Equality without their and others’ help?

Regarding the second question, as you may recall in early January President Biden finally acceded to our SLPs’ demand to “equalize our society, now.” He tentatively agreed to create a new White House Office of Equity (WHOE) after we SLPs lodged our 54th major objection to his wishy-washy cabinet-level appointees that, in our eyes are undecided supporters of Total Equality and justice for all. I mean, how come Retired Gen. Lloyd Austin, President Biden’s pick for Secretary of Defense, has yet to announce he will defund the Military Police Corps?

Diana Moon Glampers, D.E. (Doctor of Equity), the soon-to-be appointed Handicapper General will be running the WHOE. She will rally her team to rapidly achieve Total Equity. And no, the new president has decided this “cabinet-level” position doesn’t need Sour Mitch’s or the Senate’s approval. Whew.

Finding funding for the WHOE is a slightly different matter, that we’re sure the president can surmount. After all, he will immediately cancel all contracts to build The Wall.

Dr. Glampers will properly handicap each and every above-average person in our great nation and “revert them to the mean.” And what a mean that will be; remember Joe the Plumber; remember Harrison Bergeron?

Clearly, Dr. Glampers will have her work cut out for her. She will be guiding us to secure a lot more equality in the US. Each of President Biden’s cabinet members will be strained by overwhelming public expectations to achieve significant accomplishments in record time. The Senate Repubs will joust against them. Not only that; he and his cabinet will be expected to interact with key Congressional Repubs, of all people, to follow the president’s strong direction for “meaningful dialog” with the enemy members across the aisle.

Less economic inequity means the US Gini Index, a measure of income inequality, will need to fall. The Gini Index has steadily increased since the 1970’s, indicating more inequality. Recently the US Gini Index was 41.5, securing a rank of 51st worst (highest) in the world. Dr. Glampers will want to push our Gini way back into its bottle towards a value of 25.0, which is equal to Ukraine’s, the most income-equal nation.

Who would have guessed Ukraine as being the nation with most-equally-distributed income of the 159 listed by IndexMundi? Not me and not likely Hunter. Nevertheless, let me be clear; even with this accolade, I’m not yet ready to move to Kiev.

Getting the US anywhere within a proverbial block of Ukraine’s Gini will be a fully-burdened political expedition on unknown, hazardous trails. Why? Because it will involve significant amounts of take-away by the government for many formally-privileged, elite people. It will certainly serve the interests of reducing inequality, but even I realize I’d better hold my political breath as long as possible.

Dr. Glampers also will be kept very busy creating new, needed policies beyond income and wealth redistribution, to staunch the spread of many other facets of inequality. I expect it will be a thoroughly fraught, but needed journey.

I hope your New Year’s was happy Diana because your days will now be super stressful and surrounded by many upset folks. We SLPs hope Themis, the Greek god of fairness, will be close at your side. Still, we stand right behind you in wishing you all the luck you can find; you’ll need it. Onward to utopian Total Equality. Here below is my list of inequalities, before my last comments.  

LIST OF INEQUALITIES

Here are 33 inequalities that have been identified in the media.  

#	Inequality Type
1	Income. Ye old faithful granddaddy measure of inequality. See Chartbook of Economic Inequality for actual #s over time for the US and other nations.
2	Wealth. The grandmommy of inequalities; where the real $$ are. See Chartbook
3	Left-Handed discrimination. Tell me about it.
4	High-school grads. We provide way more monetary support to college students; not enough for just high-school grads, over 70% of whom don’t go to college.
5	Inequitable environmentalism. Is environmentalism just for rich people? So it appears for environmental justice warriors.
6	Unequal joints. Smaller, independent marijuana growers can’t compete with “corporate” producers’ lower prices, squandering legal weed’s promise of a more equitable society.
7	Kids in poor communities often lack opportunities to play, unlike richer-families, e.g., sing, run free, and immerse themselves in imaginary worlds.
8	Environmental inequality of wild fires. Richer folks move back in, poorer folks can’t/don’t.
9	Health care. Even with the ACA, and the Repubs’ serious continuing efforts to eliminate it, 9.1% of people had no care (30M people).
10	Inequities connected with care and access for disabled people
11	Data-driven medicine “threatens to make a crushingly unequal system even more so.”
12	Economic growth. Dems’ legislation, never-to-see-daylight (until 1/21/21?), that would mandate the govt to calculate a new measure of quarterly economic GDP growth for each income decile in the US.
13	Inequality made worse by K-12 long summer vacations. But of courses.
14	Berkeley makes its libraries more “egalitarian,” and poorer, by eliminating overdue late fees that were judged inequitably paid by lower-income users.
15	Parents’ benefits at hi-tech and other firms; they get more benefits than non-parents.
16	Student debt crisis as ever-more young people attend post-HS education (college) they do it by borrowing. Total student loan debt is $1.59T. Median BA-holder debt= $32k (in 2019). Not strictly “inequality”, but hey.
17	Nannies/Domestic workers/Babysitters. These folks virtually always get compensated in cash. Thus, their income doesn’t include payment of any employment taxes, like FICA.
18	Criminal Justice. Blacks are arrested and jailed disproportionately more than other races. Such Inequities in criminal justice system for people of color have been noted since before the 18th century.
19	Employment. More young people, Blacks and Hispanics are unemployed than others. Higher unemployment for people with less than HS education and just a HS education than a college education, as always.
20	Executive employment. A disproportionately small share of S&P500 firms’ Board members (as well as other firms’) are women.
21	Generational inequities. More millennials are living with their parents that’s not always a happy place for anyone. And more Boomers are retiring and/or being subject to employers’ ageist policies.
22	Gender discrimination. Women have forever had unequal access to public buildings’ bathrooms, just eyeball the queues for the loo at any event. Build more of ‘em, and they will come.
23	Dental inequality. We need better gum control. Medicaid does not offer dental care, which harms people’s health.
24	Cellphone gender gap. Women’s usage of cellphones in low- and middle-income nations lags behind that of men causing economic harm.
25	Property tax inequity. Hispanic and Black homeowners often face higher property tax assessment rates than White homeowners in the same tax jurisdiction.
26	Psychology of inequality. It had to be: it's human nature to compare ourselves to others. But that instinct can cause psychological stress. Where we think we stand on that ladder tells you a lot about a person's life and their life outcomes. Psychologists to the rescue? If only.
27	Farmers of color. Apparently young farmers and farmers of color have been “shut out” of govt ag aid programs.
28	Mobile inequality. Being able or unable to move from one location (say in a dense, urban, “super-star” city’s core) to another location is unequally available.
29	Vintage inequality. Income inequality has erased your chance to drink exalted wines.
30	Age discrimination. Age discrimination remains a significant and costly problem for workers, their families and our economy, says the EEOC.
31	Educational expenditures Community colleges and other non-“elite” colleges spend far less per student than other schools, exacerbating inequality.
32	Japanese skateboarders are nastily discriminated against. They dare not skate on the streets.
33	The covid-19 Pandemic’s unequal effects on people’s income, health, access to childcare and other aspects of modern life.

 

I admit, there’s a potential downside of identifying the many types of inequality that we SLPs and media stalwarts like the NYTimes continuingly add to. Honestly, I’m not at all sure that tallying ever-more specific examples of inequality will actually facilitate federal policies to be enacted that can remediate the consequences for victims.

Once there are dozens of inequality types to deal with, overall perspective maybe lost. Also, diminishing returns about the relative importance of each type will come into play as evermore types of inequality are found. Sort of like what’s now happening with allocating very scarce coronavirus vaccine to 330 million of us; where nearly everyone believes themselves to be essential.

When there are dozens of specific types of inequality, each with an identified group(s) of people who’ve suffered, the Biden administration may not be able to simply change income tax rates or inheritance taxes as a remedy. Even those policy changes will require huge amounts of political capital to enact. For us SLPs though, no matter how difficult it may be to increase income and inheritance taxes on privileged people, such changes should be very high on Diana’s and Joe’s list of things to do, no matter how many peachy victories we get next week on January 5.

Income and wealth inequality and their remedies have been kicked around by economists and politicians (mostly down the road) for a very long time. But still, it’s something that has a shred of clear corrective possibility at least theoretically. Now, with many newly-identified individual victim groups for many types of inequality, unique policy remedies will likely require specific remediations. Oh my. Such are the challenges in the future world of Strong Liberal Progressives.

 

MYTHS COMMON TO BERKELEY RESIDENTS AND OTHERS WHO LIVE IN COBALT BLUE BUBBLES

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world.  Rollo May  

Here are five myths that residents of Berkeley, California may abide by.

1.      The majority of food consumers are vegetarians or vegans.  Nope. The “Vegetarianism in America” study published by Vegetarian Times showed that just 3.2% of US adults follow a vegetarian-based diet. Approximately 0.5% of those are vegans, who consume no animal products at all.

2.      Nearly everyone eats organic food.  Not yet, probably not ever. In 2017 total organic food sales reached a new high, $45.2 billion. However, these organic sales represent a petite 5.5%, also a new high, of all food sold in retail channels in the US. Organic food is more expensive than “regular” food products. Organic price premiums can range from 25% for veges and fruits to over 70% for milk products.

3.      Electric vehicles and hybrids have captured the auto market.  Hardly. L It’s true; the SF Bay Area has had the highest per capita electric vehicle (EV) sales for a while. Berkeley enjoys the 8th highest purchase share of EVs of California cities, about 18%. When you drive around Berkeley the number of Teslas, and to a much lesser extent Chevy Bolts and Nissan Leafs, is quite impressive. Nevertheless, when I travelled 6,200 miles on highways back and forth across the US within the last month, my EV sitings were very far and very few between. No surprise; the market share of battery-powered EVs across America is a meagre 2.4% as of September. If you add plug-in hybrids, the EV market share inches upwards to a frail 3.1%.

4.      Summer.  Summer in Berkeley is a myth. It’s filled with fog and cool temperatures. Daily high temperatures in Berkeley during the usual summer months (June – August) are much nippier than many other places. Visitors to the SF Bay Area during summer are often shocked that they need sweaters, not just t-shirts to feel comfortable during the day. That’s because the weather in Berkeley is dominated by the cool Pacific Ocean. As Mark Twain allegedly stated, "The coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent in San Francisco." Berkeley’s warmest (e.g., summer) month is actually September, when the average daily high temp is 74.8˚F. The average high temp for June through August is a chillier 73.8˚F. If you want to be cool, Berkeley’s your place. But to avoid the myth of Berkeley summer, you’ll need to know the way to San Jose, where the average high temp for June through August is balmy 81.0˚F.

5.      Inequality.  For decades the City of Berkeley, and its voters, have been actively engaged in reducing many forms of social and economic inequality. Yet by some measures Berkeley’s inequality is persistently higher; it’s not utopian pure parity. The Berkeley Unified School District was the first in the nation (in 1968) to voluntarily implement a two-way busing program to facilitate desegregation. In June, Berkeley opened the doors of another and new $2.4 million shelter for the homeless. Starting Oct. 1, the city’s minimum wage is $15/hr. It has offered a host of social services for those who don’t have resources and/or opportunities that others have. However, one curious result is that the city’s Gini Index (GI) – a statistical measure of income inequality – is much higher (indicating more inequality) than its neighboring communities. The GI for Berkeley is 0.532 (comparable to that of Guatemala, ranked 10th highest in income inequality). In contrast, the GI for Alameda County is 0.459 and for nearby Concord is 0.389. Why is this, despite the city’s demonstrably broad efforts to provide for its poorer residents? Most likely, it’s because of the fairly large degree of economic "natural diversity" within the city. This is also why the GI's for Concord and Alameda County are much lower, since they’re less economically diverse. In this sense, Berkeley’s lower GI, although concerning, may not be totally dire. 

EQUALITY, LIBERTY AND FRATERNITY

Inequality is not so much a cause of economic, political, and social processes as a consequence. Some of these processes are good, some are bad, and some are very bad indeed. ~ Angus Deaton    

I have a problem with inequality, and with equality. In this blog I take a tour of the inequality landscape, through its ups (bad) and downs (good).

For the blog’s title I’ve transposed the famous tripartite slogan of the French Revolution – Liberty, Equality and Fraternity – and placed equality first. Equality may have played second fiddle to liberty in late 18th century France, but not now. The current focus of many politicians, commenters and perhaps voters – mostly Democrats –is predominantly on inequality, not as much on liberty and little on fraternity. Except to close them on campuses.

This is hardly surprising. The liberal media is awash with explanations of how widespread and multi-faceted inequality has become; and how it needs to be thwarted before something really nasty happens. Such nastiness might happen, but I haven’t found any quantitative evidence showing that inequality per se actually has caused economic damage. The Nobel-laurate Professor Angus Deaton makes this important point in his quote at the top of this page. It’s a consequence not a cause.

Technical literature examining inequality includes a growing number of qualitative discussions about the harm of inequality, but next to no quantitative findings seem to exist about inequality directly causing economic and socio-cultural loss. No matter, we just know from our gut that rising inequality will eventually cause some sort of revolution.  
The possible consequences of rising inequality have more to do with issues surrounding equity, fairness and lack of opportunity rather than higher unemployment, weaker income increases and lower GDP growth. Whatever its status, the perception of increased inequality in its many forms may lead people to feel threatened and upset. Politicians have capitalized on these feelings, as we know all too well.

When I Googled inequality, 20.3 million results were immediately referenced. Google’s ngram viewer shows that mentions of inequality in the vast array of literature it searches grew by 29% between 1980 and 2000. A recent Pew survey found that 82% of Americans think inequality is either a very or moderately big problem.

Inequality is not a new issue. Paleontologists suggest that after settled agriculture became widespread in the Fertile Crescent and beyond about 10,000 years ago, inequality steadily rose. The owners of land were much richer and wealthier than the people who worked on it; their houses were much larger. It was certainly alive and well during the Middle Ages when Kings, Queens, Dukes and Duchesses ruled the west. If inequality has been present for virtually all of recorded human history, is it really always a problem or more a feature of human society that may even have made a contribution to humanity’s stunning progress? In the minds of capital “P” Progressives, this notion borders on blasphemy.

The general view is inequality, beyond some unstated level (that’s lower than the current one), detrimentally affects our modern society, causing a host of problems. For progressives, we have already arrived at this level. If asked when it started, November 8, 2016 is an often mentioned answer. Inequality has become a crucial, often-stated crisis that must be remedied now. No one in an ivory tower, think tank, public office or sidewalk café knows what degree of inequality will spawn their feared difficulties, but many citizens believe inequality shouldn’t continue to rise, as it has since the 1970s.

How much inequality (or for that matter, equality) should we accept as a society is the ultimate question. What kind of inequality should be our primary focus? And how should it be allayed? Predictably, there are many answers depending on one’s socio-economic, political and cultural perspective.

During the past two years the progressive media and politicians have expanded the scope of inequality beyond its historic confines of just unequal distributions of income and wealth. In researching this blog I counted 11 different, inter-related varieties of inequality that have gained attention and may be candidates for remedy. There are, undoubtedly, more.

Less realized is that eradicating all inequality in its myriad of forms although conceptually beneficial would likely impinge on our freedom as well as our fraternity. Very few folks think about these effects, despite there always being unintended consequences. For some progressives – including many who’ve expressed interest in running against our sardonic, zero-sum, bullet-point president in 890 days– remedying inequality requires imposing significant redistributive taxes on income and wealth. Such taxes can reduce inequality and also pay for new equality- stimulating programs.

Talismanic programs that progressive Democrats believe they must hold close and subscribe to if they want to get support from their base include: universal single-payer healthcare (e.g., Medicare for All), government guaranteed jobs, higher minimum wage (based on a living wage), free college, legalized marijuana and less restrictive immigration rules. These dramatic programs will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to implement and will significantly broaden government’s presence in our everyday activities. More strategically, they will also need to surmount the likely herculean challenge mentioned in numerous surveys, including a Gallup poll, that two-thirds of respondents believe “big government” is the main threat to the nation’s future. One does not diminish inequality with small government.

The seeming sincerity of politicians like Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Chris Van Hollen, and Bernie Sanders to drastically reduce inequality is both endearing and concerning. Their urgency reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron.”

“Harrison Bergeron” satirically addresses the quest for equality. The story describes the US 120 years into the future. It starts, “The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal, they weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way.” Total equality has been nationally mandated by the passage of the 211th, 212th and 213th Amendments to the US Constitution. Ultimate equality is vigorously enforced by the “unceasing vigilance of the US Handicapper General [H-G],” Diana Moon Glompers. She keeps the nation filled to the brim with equality so it will not edge back “to the dark ages with everybody competing against everybody else.”

Beautiful people are forced to wear masks, or in the case of Mr. Bergeron, a hideous Halloween disguise; strong, athletic people have weights attached to their bodies; smarter than average folks wear headphones that blast screeching, loud, terrible noises every couple of minutes into their heads. By law, every above-average person is handicapped by the H-G back to the mean. Everyone is equal in every way. Vonnegut’s story is a clever illustration of Aristotle’s famed adage, the worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

But back to the present…

The standard measure of income and wealth inequality is the Gini index, aka the Gini. The Gini numerically calculates the degree of inequality in in a specified distribution of income or wealth. Corrado Gini, an Italian statistician and sociologist, first described his innovative means of quantitatively measuring inequality in his 1912 paper Variability and Mutability (or as they say in his old country, Variabilità e mutabilità). The Gini index varies from zero, signifying perfect equality in the distribution of income or wealth, to 100%, representing total inequality. The higher the index’s value, the greater is the inequality. The US Gini for income has steadily risen during the past four decades.

I’ll now describe some of the forms of inequality, beginning with income inequality.

Income.  In 2015, the US Gini index for income inequality was 45.41%, according to the Chartbook of Inequality, an impressive assessment of inequality in 25 nations. The top 1% of households received approximately 20% of the pre-tax income in 2013. The CIA World Factbook ranks the US Gini index 41st most unequal for family income distribution out of 156 nations; Finland had the most equal income distribution with a Gini of 21.5%; Lesotho had the most unequal, at 63.2%.

Solutions for alleviating income inequality converge on imposing new fiscally redistributive taxes that can also fund augmented government programs to assist poorer and less fortunate people. As David Brooks put it, progressives generally prioritize and believe in expanding government to enhance equality. However, every politician knows raising taxes is hardly ever an easy lift, no matter whether she/he is a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian or Green party member or an independent. During the past several decades the rare increases in federal income taxes have been passed to directly fund new programs or mitigate budget deficits, not to remedy inequality per se. Because of the needed increases in tax revenues to equalize income distribution, every state-based effort has failed so far when people have voted on reducing income inequality. Yours truly and others have mentioned that the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed by our Republican-led Congress in December is not going to reduce income and/or wealth inequality; instead, it will clearly increase it. So it goes.

Tax increases that are targeted by progressives to improve equality by redistributing income and wealth from the rich to the rest of us include a financial transactions tax (a tax on every stock, bond and derivative sale), a wealth tax (e.g., the international 80% tax on estates of $500,000 or more than that Thomas Piketty recommended) and greater income taxes for upper income people. Higher sales taxes have also been suggested at the state level. Other programs advocated to improve equality include raising minimum wages especially by using a “living wage,” one that is sufficient to provide the necessities essential to an acceptable standard of living.

According to the San Francisco Living Wage Calculator, the living wage in SF is $19.63/hr for a one-adult household, $44.19/hr for a one-adult, two-child household. In annual terms these living wages are about $41k/yr and $92k/yr respectively. The current SF minimum wage is $14/hr, the highest in the US. Several labor unions, including the American Federation of Teachers, advocate basing minimum wages on a living wage.

Progressives also have promoted universal Basic Income (BI) programs that unconditionally provide monthly stipends to individuals. Finland has run a BI experiment since 2016 that has given 2000 unemployed Finns with 560 Euros ($660) a month, with no strings attached. Participants didn’t have to prove they were looking for work, and if they did find work they were allowed to keep on receiving the money. The Finnish government prematurely ended this experiment in late April, principally due to its large cost. The banner waved by BI promoters is now at half-staff. It’s hard to imagine it ever flying at the US Capitol.

Wealth.  Wealth and income are different. Wealth refers to the stock of assets held by a person or household at a single point in time. Income refers to money received by a person or household over some period of time, say one year. Here’s a synopsis of wealth inequality, which is closely related to but distinct from income inequality. The US wealth Gini is 80.1%, ranked 6th most unequal, behind Switzerland, out of 139 countries. The Gini of global wealth distribution is close to what the US Gini is, 80.4%. Wealth inequality in the US, as elsewhere, is much higher than income inequality. The richest 1% of Americans own (account for) 40% of the country’s wealth (total net worth). In 2014, the richest 30 individuals in the US owned about $792 billion, while the bottom half of Americans owned 1.1% of our country's wealth, also about $792 billion. So 30 people own as much assets as 157,000,000 people. That’s big-time inequality.

The old faithful, granddaddy gauges of income and wealth inequality, have been supplemented since before the last election. I found nine (9) other inter-related, mostly bitter flavors of inequality: 3 types of educational inequality (by achieved level of education, by gender and by fiscal indebtedness); dental; healthcare; criminal justice; sex; generational; and employment.

Education.  Great news, more people are now attending and graduating from post-secondary schools than ever before. In fall 2017, 20.4 million students attended American colleges and universities, constituting a 33% increase since fall 2000. In 2017, 34.6% of young adult females and 33.7% of young adult males have completed at least 4 years of college. Female graduates have outnumbered male graduates since 2015. This is one important area, among others, where females’ performance supersedes males.

Overall, this increase in college graduation has provided alumnae, and the nation, with significant, lasting benefits. Nevertheless, the majority of young adults does not attend or graduate from college despite all the media attention on college attendance. Employers’ demand for high-school graduates has atrophied. Yet federal, state and/or local governments haven’t created broad-based, effective vocational, skills-based training programs for high-school graduates.

Employment opportunities have become increasingly unequal. Unemployment numbers illustrate the disparity. The unemployment rate for people who have a B.A. or higher is currently 2.1%, 1.8% lower than the general unemployment rate. The unemployment rate for high-school graduates is 4.3%, twice as high as for college graduates. For people who don’t have a high-school or GED degree, the unemployment rate is 5.9%.

A final facet of education-based inequality is the debt owed by students who attend colleges and universities. For quite a while, critics have characterized this as the “student debt crisis.” There’s no doubt that students – whether they graduate or not – are carrying more loans and thus more debt as tuition has continued to increase. It’s not clear whether it’s a crisis or not. College students’ median loan debt is $14,400. The average student loan debt for students who have graduated from public universities (where 77% of high school grads go to college) is $25,500. In addition, some people have complained that there is student debt inequality because women carry a higher debt burden than men. This “inequality” exists for one simple reason; more young women are going to college than men. Last fall 11.5 million females attended colleges and universities versus 8.9 million men.

It’s important to put rising student debt into some perspective. Most college graduates receive a financial reward from having a college degree, higher incomes. The average bachelor’s degree holder earns about $32,000 more per year than the average high school graduate. Bachelor’s degree holders make about $1 million in additional earnings over their lifetime according to the Association of Public Land Grant Universities.

Dental.  This attention-getting headline, “How Dental Inequality Hurts Americans,” alerted me to a previously unrecognized facet of inequality. People are suffering because Medicaid doesn’t provide its recipients with dental care. Other inequalities may seem more important and have more widespread impacts; but tell that to someone whose mouth is filled with pain. Can’t we just brace ourselves and strengthen gum control?  

Healthcare.  Unequal access to healthcare has been a key socio-economic issue. One of the major goals of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to decrease the number of Americans without any health insurance coverage, an embarrassing, costly reality in our rich nation. The ACA succeeded. American healthcare inequality has steadily declined since 2013; three years after President Obama signed the ACA. In 2013 the share of people without health insurance was 18%. By 2016 it was 10.9%. In 2017, after the Republican Congress and the president stilted coverage and reduced funding, the percent of Americans without coverage increased to 12.2%. This is a senseless misfortune. It also has energized progressives’ push to enact their universal, single-payer Medicare-for-All healthcare plan once they get back in political power. I’ve discussed how this proposed plan may not be the cure-all Sen. Sanders and his compatriots envisage.

Criminal justice.  Inequities in the implementation of the US criminal justice system for people of color have been noted since before the 18th century. Most recently, the acquittal of Travon Martin’s killer in Florida and police tactics that killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City have brought these inequities front and center. Significantly more people (usually men) of color are prosecuted and jailed than white people. The figure below shows this on-going criminal justice inequality.

Source: Wikipedia

Sex.  Yes, sex inequality, or rather inequality of opportunity for having sex. Inequality’s scope is thus broadened once again. This is hardly a new issue, but it came out from between the sheets and briefly into the forefront of the media spotlight several weeks ago when an incel man (that’s an involuntarily celebrate person, for the thankfully uninitiated) mowed down a bunch of Toronto pedestrians, killing 10 of them while driving his van on a sidewalk. This horrible incident was portrayed by some as a problem that might be settled by making a “Case for Redistribution” of sex, as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat mentioned.

If we can contemplate redistributing income and wealth (see above), why not sex. This reasoning did not go down well with others. Slate writer Tyler Zimmer’s response to the Toronto incident and Douthat’s column was: if we’re serious about sexual fulfillment, we should worry more about economic inequality, and not sex robots (that Douthat suggested as an antidote, perhaps in jest).

The LGBTQ community has made remarkable progress in increasing the awareness of others about the discriminatory practices and harms brought on their members. Laws and regulations have been changed to rectify these inequalities as a consequence of their efforts.

Generational.  When you think about it there will always be generational inequalities. Because each generation (retiring Baby Boomers, adult Gen Xers, early-career Millennials) is by definition at different stages of their lives, relative to other generations. Nevertheless, Millennials’ status has is occupying a fair amount of attention, as they ascend into demographic and commercial prominence. Several stories appeared close to Mothers’ Day making note that nearly 25% of Millennials between the ages of 24 and 36 lives at home with Mom (and Dad), nearly double the 13.5% rate for that age group in 2005. Geographically, multigenerational households have formed, as expected, in the country’s most expensive rental markets. More than 30% of millennials live with their parents in New York, Los Angeles and Miami. What cities are lowest on the living-with-mom list: Austin, Seattle and Denver that aren’t cheap, but are attractive enough that Millennials are willing to leave the nest for them, despite their cost. These Millennials’ location choices echoes Laurence Peters’ quote; In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular. On the other end of the generational divide, Baby Boomers have been retiring in droves, roughly 10,000 per day. Boomers are facing inequities from employers and service providers who maintain ageist practices.

Employment.  I already mentioned the disparity of employment for people with different levels of education. Other issues, including age, gender and race/ethnicity inequalities, also are present in the nation’s labor market. In the first quarter of 2018 the average unemployment rate for all workers was 4.3%; for White people it was 3.9%; for Black/African Americans the rate was 7.3%; for Hispanic/Latinos it was 5.4%; and for Asians it was 3.0%. Unemployment rates for teenagers are more than three times as large as the overall rate: White teenagers’ unemployment rate was 12.1%; Black/African-Americans was 24.8%, the highest of any published rate; Hispanic/Latino teenagers had a 14.4% unemployment rate; Asian teenagers, 6.6%. Men’s overall unemployment rate was 4.6%, women’s was 3.5%.

Although the Q1 women’s unemployment rate was below the overall rate, they are far less frequently employed in the tippy-top echelons of American corporate enterprise. There are merely 26 women CEOs of S&P500 companies. Their presence as corporate CEOs has grown slowly during the past decade. Women also remain far outnumbered by men in the corporate board rooms of American; only 21% of S&P500 company board seats are held by women.

Unlike typical workers, the compensation that CEOs receive has continued its escalation rapidly to thermospheric heights previously unseen. Here’s the 2017 report of the top 200 best paid CEOs of publicly-traded companies. Interestingly, the salary of Mindy Grossman of Weight Watchers International (WWI), the 22nd highest paid CEO ($33.4M, that unbelievably represents just 32% of the highest paid CEO), has the highest CEO pay ratio. Her compensation is 5,908 times greater than the median salary at WWI. Also fascinating, the CEO with the second highest CEO pay ratio, 4,987, is a woman, Margaret Georgiadis, CEO of Mattel ($31.3M). Louis Hyman, a professor at Cornell, accurately portrayed the real-life inequality of these CEOs’ compensation as, “It’s grotesque how unequal this has become.”

But what about the remaining 3.9% of American workers who still can’t find a job, a low rate that we haven’t seen for more than 17 years? The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has come up with a potential answer: give them guaranteed government jobs at decent wages. Critics have said such a program could be seen as a kind of a very large hammer in search of a nail. Proponents haven’t yet offered a means of paying for such guaranteed jobs, just like Republicans blithely declined to specify how they were going to finance the tax “reform” act they passed into law last year. The US labor market would be fundamentally altered if such guaranteed jobs were actually offered by the federal government in ways it hasn’t been since Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated the Works Progress Administration’s programs in 1939, amid bread lines and 15% unemployment.

After examining these facets of inequality I remain convinced that our current state of inequality is a consequence of many inter-laced socio-economic forces, including laws, regulations and most importantly collective and individual behaviors. Some of these forces can be changed, some must be changed. Some have been changed. Many haven’t been changed.

Because every imaginable future with less inequality is not equally possible, difficult but reasoned priorities must be made. I don’t want some Diana Moon Glompers to be legally enforcing strict equality across the board that I think might be preferred in some very leftish quarters. I also don’t subscribe to blanket adoption of absolute equality as a feasible or even reasonable political goal. The quixotic plans of capital “P” Progressives to dramatically redistribute income and wealth are fraught and, I believe, destined to be politically unsuccessful, as they have been in the past. Some observers who ascribe to a more realistic, measured course of action call such plans infeasible and political suicide. I have recounted these large challenges and risks. Progressives’ push for very expensive, large government programs that might reduce some forms of inequality ultimately rest on a foundation that a few public decision-makers have oracle-like insight to justify spending hundreds of billions of dollars to achieve government-led quests to unspoiled equality. I find that prospect impossible to vote for.

Although there’s no magical threshold of equality that will consequently effect more opportunities to more people, I do believe it’s important and wise to provide more public resources to people who need them but don’t have them. These beneficiaries will ultimately improve not just their lives, but all of ours. America has eventually done this for the vast majority of our history. The current administration’s efforts to decrease wholesale economic and cultural equality should be stopped. So by all means make sure to vote this November 6th, and in the on-going primaries to throw these Republican con artists out.

I also think Plato’s characterization of democracy is an apt one: Democracy is a charming sort of government, full of variety and disorder and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike. If Democrats prudently chose to not dive into the deep left end of the political pool, and can gain some measure of actual political power in Washington and elsewhere after November, cutting back the administration’s ill-founded hydra of increased inequality will be a superb, initial start to increasing equality, liberty and fraternity.

Basic Income: A Cure-All or Misstep?

Buddy, can you spare 120,000 dimes? 

Basic Income (BI) is a type of publicly-funded economic security system. Other terms for BI include universal basic income, universal demogrant and citizen’s income. BI is considered by some as a mechanism that can lead to a more equitable, just and utopian society. Ideally, BI provides all citizens with a regular, unconditional sum of money from the government, in addition to any income received from elsewhere.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, literary utopias began with Plato's Republic, where he described a communal society that eliminates poverty and enjoys an equitable distribution of income and resources for its citizens, with no lawyers. What’s not to love about this Republic? In 1516 Sir Thomas More’s Utopia first coined the term and was the “modern” primogenitor of all utopian considerations. Unfortunately, whenever any group – and there have been many – has attempted to actually create and live in such a setting, it’s ultimately been a fraught, generally futile process that appeals to few people (e.g., Twin Oaks in Virginia, Icaria in Illinois and New Harmony, Indiana).

Nevertheless, more contemporary believers in idyllic possibilities have considered BI as a way of getting to a larger-scale Eden. There have been several implementations of BI-like policies that have enjoyed some success including one in Alaska (of all places) and another in Brazil.

The Permanent Fund of Alaska [PFA], established in 1976, is seen more as a re-distribution program funded by North Slope petroleum tax revenues, rather than a basic income program. Nevertheless, several aspects of the PFA illustrate its close ties to BI. In 2015, the PFA provided Alaskan residents with $2,072, the highest yearly payment ever. These payments to Alaska’s more than 710,000 citizens represented 2.9% of its Gross State Product in 2015. Such large payments are not likely to be forthcoming this year or for as long as the price of oil remains relatively low. [The price of West Texas Intermediate– the US benchmark oil price – was $48.03/bbl on June 28; 1 year ago it was $61.70; 2 years ago it was $91.81.]

For the first time in decades, Alaska had a fiscal deficit last year due to dramatic drops in world oil prices. Because of the deficit, Alaska politicians are now considering using PFA funds to help balance their state budget rather than only directly paying residents – something that Alaska voters aren’t at all pleased about.

Brazil’s much-praised Bolsa Familia program, started in 2003, is not unconditional or universal but is fairly broadly offered. Payments are provided to over 13 million Brazilian poor families (about 26% of Brazil’s population), based on income criteria. To receive payments families must have their kids vaccinated and must send them to school. Average monthly payments are 70 reals ($21); average per capita GDP in Brazil is $993/mo. The Bolsa Familia program costs about $19 billion annually, roughly 0.6% of Brazil’s GDP.

The proponents of BI, who include left-leaning folks, argue that it’s the right solution to the ever-increasing problems of income inequality and poverty. Income inequality has become a prominent issue in American political discussions. [So pervasive has the “inequality” issue become in the media that last week The Atlantic posted a story under the headline, “Why lightning disproportionately kills the poor.” What’s one to do but contact Thor and Xolotl (respectively, the Norse god of thunder and lightning and the Aztec god of lightning) and beseech them to change their ways, reduce lightning inequality and abide by a lower Gini Index.]

But enough about unequal lightning and back to BI.

There are now debates in France, the Netherlands and Finland about how to begin Basic Income pilot programs. The Swiss held a BI referendum this month that was strongly defeated. The Swiss Basic Income Initiative received 76.9% “no” votes. The unstated but expected BI monthly payment was to be about 2,500 Swiss francs ($2,560) per adult, with a smaller subsidy for children, without regard to employment, education, disability, age or wealth. Small-scale BI projects have been instituted in Namibia, India and Iran.

Several Americans have proposed BI pilots in the US, including Sam Altman a wealthy, Bay Area tech entrepreneur. In May he proposed that his startup incubator, Y-Combinator, will run a “short-term” BI study in Oakland, CA with the purpose of learning “how to pay people, how to collect data, how to randomly choose a sample, etc.” that could lead to a long-term study. Predictably, his announcement received much publicity. But conspicuously absent from this proclamation were any actual details about the proposed study, such as when it would begin, its size, how long it would last and perhaps most critical, how much the payments would be. As such, it was an impressive but empty statement; it lacked any substantive details or actual commitment.

It’s beyond rare that a potential pilot BI program mentions the income payments that would be offered. This is probably by design since once a payment level is stated costs could be calculated and there would be protests about its inappropriateness – both too high and too low.

Nevertheless, here is my payment suggestion as a thought experiment for US BI income levels designed to reduce inequality and eliminate “official” poverty; $1,000/mo for 1 person ($12,000/yr), $1,700/mo ($20,400/yr) for a family of 3. BI-like programs, such as Bolsa Familia, do not have this substantial objective; instead they provide smaller, supplemental payments to ease poverty.

My suggestion is based on the official federal government-determined poverty-level incomes that are established each year, based on household size. The 2016 federal poverty “guidelines” are $11,880/yr for 1 person and $20,160 for a family of 3 people. The guidelines’ income levels for family sizes range from 1 person to over 8 people.

For some perspective, the current legal minimum wage in California is $10/hr or $20,800/yr with full-time work. In San Francisco the minimum wage will be $13/hr in July (about $27,000/yr).

I was interested to see how my suggested poverty-purging BI’s compared with proposed and much-discussed (but not implemented) living wage levels. [A living wage is an income level that approximates the costs of a person’s/family’s basic living expenses such as food, clothing, housing and medical care.] Using MIT’s handy living wage calculator for US states and localities, the 2015 living wage for Alameda County, CA is $13.35/hr for a single adult or $27,800/yr with full-time work. If the household has 1 adult and 2 children, the living wage is $32.09/hr or $66,700/yr. Thus, even my substantial BI’s represent only 30% of a living-wage based income for a family of 3.

Interestingly, the median household income in Alameda County is $67,169, which is almost the same income level that the MIT living-wage based income level is for a family of 3. As you recall, median income represents the income level that divides the distribution of income (here, for Alameda County) into two equivalent parts. This illustrates the practical fantasy of considering changing minimum wage levels to family-sized living wage levels. The living-wage minimum is almost equal to the median income level, meaning virtually 50% of the population’s income would need to be increased, which would be a political impossibility because it would be a very expensive effort.

Predictably, the strongest criticism of BI programs centers on their substantial costs.

Even if my suggested BI program is limited to providing $12,000 per year only to citizens 21 years and older, it could cost $2.78 trillion (T) per year or about 15% of our GDP and require the vast majority of federal tax revenues. This BI program would be much more expensive – greater than 3 times more – than merely offering tuition-free public university education.

The total FY2015 federal budget is $3.8T and total federal tax revenues last year were $2.96T. Because my BI program thus represents 94% of all tax revenues, the federal government couldn’t spend anything for much else except the BI program. With virtually any BI program, taxes would need to increase substantially, and not only for the rich and wealthy.

If my BI payments are cut to $2,000, which wouldn’t come close to clearing the poverty line (but would be as much as the Alaska Permanent Fund provided last year), the program would  cost $463 billion per year, representing 80% of what CY2015 defense expenditures are and over 15% of total federal tax revenues.

A BI program not only is wildly expensive, but many critics also state that such government-provided income can diminish folks’ incentives for seeking paid employment as well as lowering the motivation of workers displaced by robots (or far, far more likely, by other workers) from participating in skill-enhancement and -training programs. Potential alternatives to ameliorating poverty and labor displacement more cost-effectively include increasing the well-regarded, existing federal Earned Income Tax Credit, broadening government-funded job retraining programs or even creating a low-wage employment subsidization system.

As professor Laurence Summers stated, “A universal basic income is one of those ideas that the longer you look at it, the less enthusiastic you become.” Nationally implementing even a modest BI program would be an expensive misstep. Basic Income is a misplaced idea whose time hasn’t come. It’s time for Biexit.