Bob Herbert: “Losing Our Way”
Bob Herbert’s final column for the New York Times is a humdinger. And not in a cheerful way.
Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.
The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.
As a case study in misplaced priorities, Herbert points to an article from Friday’s Times, “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Maybe the unemployed and poor just need better lobbyists? The NYT is losing a good one in Bob Herbert.
Mollie,
Glad I checked before posting. You beat me to it. Of late, Mr. Herbert risked sounding only one theme in his columns. Perhaps that’s why he’s leaving. But it’s a crucial theme:
“Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home. New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed.”
And one can only admire his new undertaking:
“I’m off to write a book and expand my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society.”
Mollie — did you and Joseph Komonchak coordinate your recent posts? In any case, his quotation from Augustine about unicorns in their pride, and Herbert’s message seem in exact consonance.
“Young people. . .will be less well off than their elders.”
For a lot of them, is that a bad thing? The “high standard of living” a lot of them enjoy and expect to continue enjoying is one of the major reasons that the planet is a mess. Isn’t it also at the root of the “limitless greed” and “unrestrained corporate power” that they and their elders so often endorse? As for “properly educating the young,” they are being properly educated — if maintaining the “high standard of living” is the goal of education.
First Rich – now Herbert.
What is hapening at NYT?
The fnal column is spot on.
Where we are headed is second rate plutocracy.
Bob — We’re already there.
Bob — One other thing. You asked what is happening at the NYT? I don’t think anything is happening at the NYT. They’ve always been an Establishment rag. The range of opinion represented in its op-ed pages has always been very limited. Next to Paul Krugman, Herbert has been the most “liberal” of the contributors, but that’s actually not saying very much. The problem with liberals such as Herbert (and Krugman, for that matter) is exhibited by the statement I criticized earlier: they still believe that middle-class kids should have at least the standard of living their parents enjoyed, yet they also complain about the avarice and corruption and ecological despoliation that inevitably results from the pursuit of such “happiness.”
Eugene, perhaps you can unpack what you are writing. The question is whether 5% of the population should control all the wealth. They can wreck havoc with the planet just as well as the middle class. The point is that the middle class kids deserve a chance to wreck the planet or not. Just as the 5% do.
The financial guru, Suze Orman is now saying that people should dream less. Of course, while she and her patrons can have dreams unheard of in the history of the world…..
I wonder how really selfish most of the rich are. Warren Buffett complains that it is unfair for him to pay only 19% in taxes while his employees pay 33%. He and Gates have gotten a lot of very rich people to pledge to give away at least more than half of their wealth, and they’re spreading that Gospel overseas. No, philantropy isn’t enough. And few of us, rich or middle class, really listen to the actual cries of the poor. But I wonder just how much conscious selfishness is the cause of our failed economic system. Yes, at the moment it is in a failed state.
I can’t help but wonder whether many of our economic problems are due not to lack of individual virtue but also to some very, very bad laws that permit the super-greedy to dominate the economic system. The foremost bad law is the one that requires a corporation to benefit only the owners, with the workers and public having no power to influence them (except through unions, of course, but we seem to have lost that insight). Next would come the whole structure of loop-holes that benefit individual corporations and make the general laws irrelevant.
Why do we have such rotten business laws? First, we don’t pay enough attention to them because they’re boring, but mainly we support local politicians who support loop-holes for local industries. For instance, Louisiana simply won’t vote for politicians who don’t favor the oil companies, and I don’t doubt that Delaware would vote in politicians who would change their lax laws that attract corporations to domicile there. (Yes, Delaware, in its quiet way, weakens our whole corporate system. Correct me if I’m wrong.)
It’s just too simple to blame the *other* greedy guy. It’s the indifferent guys, the ignorant guy, and the bored guys (us) who share responsibility for the current situation.
Bill — Of course I don’t believe that the top 5% should control most of the wealth. But I don’t see why we should continue fretting that a lot of young people will be “less well off than their elders.” The dreams of avarice that many of those elders have implanted in their kids need to be dispelled, and quickly. In fact, those dreams help to keep control over the wealth in the hands of the top 5% — hold those carrots in front of everyone, and they’ll keep running the pointless race of accumulation. The more we keep complaining that the next generation won’t be as “well off” as their elders, the longer we postpone the urgent work of remaking our moral imagination of what “well off” and “happy” really mean. It’s not exactly news that having fewer material possessions — and not having to work so frenetically to acquire them — might well enable us to be happier.
Ann — Philanthropy from exploiters such as Buffett and Gates — Guffett, for short — is a time-tested way of distracting from the system that enriched them. So what if they give away half their wealth — does that wipe the sin off the money? Are low-low-wage workers overseas who lose their eyesight soldering silicon chips onto Microsoft computers supposed to feel better when Guffett gives to them as philanthropy what truly belongs to them as a right?
The super-greedy dominate the system because that’s the way the system is set up. Pointing to “bad laws” is akin to saying that “bad apples” like Bernie Madoff are the problem — not the system itself.
As for conscious greed not being the problem, I’ll just quote the Warren half of Guffett himself: “Of course there’s a class struggle, and my side is winning.”
Eugene –
You over-simplify Buffett’s position. He regularly criticizes the American capitalist system as unjust. And don’t think that anybody who takes profits from contemporary corporations (check out your own retirement system) is very different from him. Yeah, remote material cooperation is all around us.
Simply faulting a rich guy is not constructive. True, the current economic theories seem to be inadequate to solving our problems. Maybe there just *aren’t* any very solid economic systems, and even if there are, there will always be human choice to corrupt them. But we know there is a lot of ignorance of economics in all quarters, and there is general acceptance of the unfair and unwise laws due to ignorance and indifference. So let’s start with criticism of ourselves, the voters. We put up with the system, and we ought not to.
GE has done what companies do, and everyone else, too. Raising taxes spawns tax avoidance schemes, as surely as poking a hornet nest with a stick gets you stung.
We can’t arrange all things in life to be just so, among other reasons because they involve contradictions. Thus the Tea Party can’t have lower taxes and a smaller deficit simultaneously, any more than I can eat chocolate cake every night and also lose weight. So the Tea Party needs to pick one problem to solve and live with the other. It’s not difficult to predict which it will pick. Nor can progressives improve primary education and leave the current arrangement with teachers’ unions intact, because the two goals are opposed. So progressives also need to make choices.
In the GE example, we can have profitable corporations that create lots of high-paying American jobs, or we can impose high taxes on those corporations. But we can’t have both. If we impose higher taxes, large corporations don’t have to just sit and take it – they have lots of options, and as the GE story illustrates, they will exercise them.
Jim –
Historically it has been the new corporations that have provided significant numbers new jobs, not the “mature” industries. The latter need to be taxes and the former need temporary tax breaks to get going. The government itself can also provide huge numbers of jobs without any hope of financial profit to the country. The trick is to channel sufficient energies and innovation into new industries and into repairing and replacing aged infrastructure. With more jobs come more taxes and the ability of the government to pay off the debt it incurred in encouraging innovation and sound infrastructure.
The complexity of the economic system is not an intrinsically bad thing — its many factors can be played in such a way that it can get itself out of some very tight spots. It has done so before, and can do so again. But the die-hard anti-Keynesian conservatives will have to learn that it takes money to spend your way out of a recession/depression. (Most of the really big economists like Greenspan et al have already admitted this.) Changing one’s mind about fundamental beliefs is a terribly hard thing to do, but it’s been done before successfully. See the New Deal. Yes, ironically, expenditures on WWII helped. But those expenditures also proved that spending can remedy depressions.
I guess if we abolish all corporate income taxes whatsoever, then what a wonderful would this would be!
Jim said: “In the GE example, we can have profitable corporations that create lots of high-paying American jobs, or we can impose high taxes on those corporations. But we can’t have both. If we impose higher taxes, large corporations don’t have to just sit and take it – they have lots of options, and as the GE story illustrates, they will exercise them.”
This isn’t really true. Productivity has gone up like what, 47 percent the the last 20 years? Wages have stayed flat. Corporations are taking more, pure and simple. In the rest of the developed world, they are not allowed to do this, yet somehow they manage to meet and beat us in their standard of living, educational levels, longevity, infant mortality, etc. etc. There is a difference between saying that corporations need to make profits and corporations should have no limit on the profits they make. I’m sure that CEOs back in the day (that day being in 1980) who earned 30 times the wage of the average worker worked just as hard as the ones who now on average make more like 300 times the wage of the average worker.
Regarding your comment on teacher’s unions, your statement there isn’t true either, unless you are saying that progressives want to improve primary education by having carte blanche ability to fire teachers or reduce their wages; by using The Stick. I think it’s the Right that loves the rod.
unagidon, I invite you to read our local newspapers to see what is happening at Caterpillar, a major employer in Illinois, particularly in Downstate Illinois, where high-paying manufacturing jobs are very difficult to come by. Caterpillar is making rumblings about leaving Illinois because Gov. Pat Quinn, in a move lionized in a recent Commonweal editorial, hiked income tax rates by 67%, precisely (although inadequately) to keep intact public-employee pension funds which are so underfunded that it will take decades, perhaps 100 years, for the state to catch up. Thus we have the specter of public employee unions being politically favored (this, according to Commonweal editors, in accordance with Catholic teaching) in such a way that many thousands of privately-employed union members could lose their jobs. How the latter squares with Catholic promotion of unions I haven’t yet discovered but am still searching the relevant documents.
You could certainly argue that Caterpillar is not serious about leaving Illinois, and I suspect you’d be right. But they are up to something – most likely, I suppose, fishing for an exemption from the income tax increases. This is nothing different than what GE, which also employs many thousands of union employees, does.
“Regarding your comment on teacher’s unions, your statement there isn’t true either, unless you are saying that progressives want to improve primary education by having carte blanche ability to fire teachers or reduce their wages; by using The Stick. I think it’s the Right that loves the rod.”
Sorry I wasn’t clear. Maintaining the current arrangement with teachers unions, and improving the education of students, are contradictory goals. They are opposed. Progressives can have one, or they can have the other, but they can’t have both simultaneously.
A lot of lives – generations of lives, now – have been irreparably harmed because progressive politicians consistently choose the teachers unions’ political contributions over the welfare of students for whom we are supposed to exercise a preferential option.
“Productivity has gone up like what, 47 percent the the last 20 years? Wages have stayed flat. Corporations are taking more, pure and simple.”
Nothing in real life is simple (as Ann mentioned in a recent comment). For much, much more on the gap between productivity and blue-collar real wages, check out this accessibly-written paper:
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/rlawrence/Lawrence%20for%20Brandeis.pdf
There is undeniably a gap, and part of it (although not much) is attributable to the super-rich and corporations gobbling up more profits. But there are technical explanations for the seeming gap that account for much more of it. And when non-salary benefits for blue-collar workers are included in the measures, it’s not nearly as bad as it seems at first glance.
Unfunded liabilities and unchecked growth of government are the reason for the government’s bottomless thirst for revenue and the source of the titanic burden of debt faced by future generations. The notion that young people’s future is jeopardized merely because some aren’t paying enough in taxes is absurd, and the willful blindness of so many to the issue of debt –a profound matter of social justice– is obscene.