E.J. Dionne's op-ed in today's Washington Post touches on a subject that more of us need to think about--the relationship between inequality and the ability of civil society to confront and repair its ills. The gist is that we have to begin to address the "structural problems of poverty, racism, and class inequality." Here's an excerpt.
According to the U.S. Census, black households in 2005 had a median income of $30,858, compared with $50,784 for non-Hispanic white households. The black poverty rate was 24.9 percent. The white poverty rate was 8.3 percent.
In 2005, according to the Justice Department, 4.7 percent of black males were in prison or jail, compared with 0.7 percent of white males. For men in their late 20s, just under 12 percent of blacks were incarcerated, compared with 1.7 percent of whites. Life expectancy for black men is more than six years shorter than for white men. ...
Dionne challenges us to recognize that condemning Don Imus for his unwarranted, racist and sexist slur against the Rutgers women's basketball team is all fine and good. The response, however, will be just a point in a long line of gestures that do not get to the heart of the matter if we do not carry it further. We must connect our condemnation of the trash-talking about African Americans to a condemnation of the unequal economic status of many African Americans in our country today. And that condemnation must go beyond mere words: we have to find solutions that address the economic and social contexts that perpetuate that status.
For me, that means that the media, among others, has to do a better job of de-bunking the claims of narrow special interest groups to be speaking for the good of ordinary Americans--especially when it comes to interpreting the role of the "market" and the impact of tax law changes on everyday lives. It means understanding that a capitalist market system is only good if the market works for ordinary people, with broad-based economic growth shared across the spectrum rather than narrow economic growth for those at the very top (the hedge fund managers who are able to postpone tax on their wages and magically transform compensation income into preferentially taxed capital gains income and the corporate managers who are able to use all the many incentives in the code for timing their income and taxes to their benefit while treating corporate employees as disposable commodities). It means developing a tax system focused on fair treatment of ordinary Americans.
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