Redistribute My Work Ethic, Not My Wealth

“As matters now stand, many enjoy having people to look down on, especially people they never meet in their economically segregated towns and whose problems they never hear discussed in their culturally segregated media.” Sanford Rose

Dolors & Sense

By Sanford Rose

KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—10/14/2013—That provocative bumper sticker of the hard-core Right haunts me.

It is so right and yet so wrong.

It is true that many of the poor and near-poor have bad, or non-existent, work ethics. Why wouldn’t they? They have not worked very much, or at all, in the past five years. It is hard to cultivate or retain an ethic about an activity in which one rarely indulges.

Perhaps just as compelling, those who have been lucky enough to stay employed haven’t profited overmuch from this situation. The wages of the median worker, after taking into account inflation, buy less than they did a decade ago.

The good life is someone else’s life.

Hard to stay motivated when that’s the case.

To be sure, there are remunerative jobs out there. But the poor don’t have the skills to fill these jobs.

Well, why don’t they get training?

Easier said than done. Despite the heroic efforts of many community colleges, most institutional training programs fail. The poor drop out. That’s largely because the programs are not structured for those whose attention spans are limited by crushing financial problems or the exhaustion of holding down two or more badly paying part-time jobs. These programs need creative redesign.

Of course, the best training is the on-the-job variety. The rub is that private companies have ruthlessly pared their training budgets.

Job training is increasingly an activity that government must initiate, probably by paying employers to do that training which, in halcyon days, they used to finance themselves.

But the government today operates in the red, when it operates at all (although the deficit is a much smaller percentage of GDP than it was a few years ago).

This means that massive job training programs necessitate more government borrowing in the short run and higher taxes in the long run—unless, of course, as some reputable economists insist, properly designed job training will raise national output and thus tax revenues sufficiently to be self-financing.

If higher taxes are indeed needed, they must come from those with some wealth.

Thus the bumper sticker noted in my title may have it backwards: in order to redistribute the work ethic, one must first undertake some redistribution of wealth.

But will hardliners in this polarized society permit such a seditious effort?

As matters now stand, many enjoy having people to look down on, especially people they never meet in their economically segregated towns and whose problems they never hear discussed in their culturally segregated media.

Hardliners would rather just affix those stickers.