The Misplaced Energy of Edulcoration
Dolors & Sense
by Sanford Rose
KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—10/17/11—Politicians are dulcet; life isn’t.
Politicians tell us that America is the land of opportunity.
In reality, upward social and economic mobility is declining.
There is less likelihood of moving from the bottom to the upper reaches of the income distribution ladder in the US than in the past.
The near-poor have been historically lukewarm about the need for income redistribution.
That’s probably because they were afraid that the really-poor, likely beneficiaries of redistributive schemes, would vault past them.
It is important to have someone to look down on.
But that’s changing. The virtually scandalous skewness of income and wealth distribution is impressing on most sectors of the population the urgent need for reform.
Reform can come in part from mortgage-principal forgiveness. The poor, excluded from the chance to earn enough to own houses, seized that chance, with the short-sighted connivance of the rich, by over-borrowing.
They can be confirmed in their desperate gamble by judicious reductions in the amount of owed principal.
But the rich, rudely awakened to their past dangerous complicity with the un-housed, will not allow this to any measurable degree.
Nor is it a viable long-term approach to solving distributive problems, although it is essential, in the short run, to reinvigorating a perilously becalmed economy.
In the long run, distributive problems are soluble only by a nationwide plan to train the untrained.
The poor are not poor because they get less pay for a 35-hour week than the rich.
They are poor because no one wants to employ them for those 35 hours.
Instead of prating about the need for jobs, instead of orating vacuously about the capacity of American businesses to create those jobs when freed from uncertainty and “onerous” government restrictions, politicians should buckle down to the hard task of identifying those expenditures for training with the greatest potential for preparing the poor and near-poor for the jobs they covet but cannot now hope to fill.
Rhetoric about America’s strength rings hollow when as many as one in six is underemployed in part because he/she is undertrained.
Sanford Rose
Sanford Rose, of New Jersey and Florida, served as Associate Editor of Fortune Magazine from 1968 till 1972; Vice President of Chase Manhattan Bank in 1972; Senior Editor of Fortune between 1972 and 1979; and Associate Editor, Financial Editor and Senior Columnist of American Banker newspaper between 1979 and 1991. From 1991 till 2001, Rose worked as a consultant in the banking industry and a professional ghost writer in the field of finance. He has also taught as an adjunct professor of banking at Columbia University and an adjunct instructor of economics at New York University. He states that he left gainful employment in 2001 to concentrate on gain-less investing. (A lifelong photo-phobe, Rose also claims that the head shot accompanying his Weekly Hubris columns is not his own, but belongs, instead, to a skilled woodworker residing in South Carolina.)