The 47% Charge in U.S. History

There are many angles – and many comments on each angle – to Mitt Romney’s statement that 47% of American voters are “dependent upon government, … believe that they are victims, … believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, … that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it,” and “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Pundits have already dissected the political ramifications of the speech, what it reveals about Romney’s world-views, and have speculated about his resulting political prospects. Many have presented the underlying numbers. (That is, 47% of American households in 2009 paid no federal income tax; just about all paid other kinds of taxes. By far, most of the 47% were either households of people who worked at poverty wages or of retirees on Social Security.)

My two cents here concerns the emotional resonance of Romney’s claim. Whatever the facts may be, the charge that huge numbers of shiftless moochers live off hard-working taxpayers feels true to many Americans – and has felt true to many Americans for centuries. It is a sentiment rooted in Americans’ exceptional emphasis on individual self-reliance and insistence on conditioning help upon virtue. (I link below to earlier posts that expand on these points.)

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Between Dole and Market

Much of the recent debate over the proper role of government in the lives of the economically unfortunate poses a choice between letting Americans make as much of their opportunities as they can in the free market versus providing people with a stronger safety net, effectively a “dole” that some claim would undermine Americans’ work ethic. Newt Gingrich has, for instance, contrasted a food stamp system that claims to be compassionate to a work system that insists on work and thereby really is compassionate.

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Even liberals have accepted this framing of the debate by emphasizing how much families in distress need help such as unemployment insurance, free school lunches, health assistance, and mortgage relief. Some of the Occupy movement’s rhetoric (e.g., “eat the rich,” “millionaires’ tax”) also seems to accept that the choice we face is either an uncontrolled market or monetary redistribution.

But there is a middle position here. America has often acted in ways that neither put people on the dole nor let them sink-or-swim in the market, ways that help the unfortunate and the fortunate at the same time.

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Home Owning Dreams

Owning one’s own home seems vital to being an American; it is intimately tied  to our understanding of the “American Dream.” The headline of a 2008 Newsweek story on the foreclosure crisis blared “The American Dream – Only This Time in Reverse.”  When NPR recently broadcast a story that rates of home ownership had dropped from a peak of  69% in 2005 to 66%, the voices on the radio carried the melancholy tone of loss.

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However, the dream of home ownership, complete with a white picket fence, was not always considered the ultimate test of making it in America. There was a time when many affluent Americans preferred to rent, leaving home-buying to striving immigrants. Then, in the mid-twentieth century, Uncle Sam helped make home ownership the American Dream.

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American Exceptionalism

Ending his April 5th House floor presentation of the largest proposed cutback of government spending in history, Congressman Paul Ryan declared, “It is now up to all of us to keep America exceptional.” It was the third time Ryan invoked American exceptionalism in his speech. The idea of exceptionalism has surfaced with some energy recently. President Obama, for example, was chastised for not thinking of America as exceptional and he seemed later to take pains to claim that he, too, believes it is exceptional. Exceptionalism has (again) become a buzzword. (A conservative columnist even cited my book as proof that a liberal sociologist acknowledges America’s exceptionalism.)

There are at least two different ways the term exceptionalism is used and it is worth sorting those out. Congressman Ryan’s use of the term is quite appropriate and worth close attention. The exceptionalism he means may, however, go deeper than he imagines.

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Return on Investment

In 1977 or so, I was one of a number of social scientists who got a freebie from the U.S. government: use of a portable teletype machine that would allow me to send messages to other social scientists over something called “ARPAnet” – the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency computer network.

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It looked sort of like the device to right. I could type out messages on a roll of paper and someone else on the “net” – whatever that was – could get my machine to type their answers back to me.

The purpose of the loan was to see if scientists could put this kind of communication systems to good use, to find out if this “electronic mailing” technology would accelerate scientific collaboration and discovery. Given the expense of the device, I was to share it with the professor next door, Ron Burt (now at the University of Chicago Business School). It turns out that I didn’t have much to write over the ARPAnet, but Ron did, so he mainly held on to the device.

Thus, I was a minuscule – and not too helpful – part of a federal project that eventuated in the “World Wide Web,” the Internet, online commerce like Amazon and Zappos, social networks like MySpace, and cute kitten videos on Youtube. Our tax dollars have paid off. But for whom?

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Caring More or Less

“Should there be a pauper among you . . . you shall not harden your heart and clench your hand against your brother the pauper. But you shall surely open your hand to him . . . .” (Deut. 15:7-8; Alter trans.). A recurrent question about modern America is to what extent we have adhered to this and similar admonitions to care for “the least of these.”

The question is prompted by a new book from Katherine Newman and Elisabeth Jacobs, Who Cares?: Public Ambivalence and Government Activism from the New Deal to the Second Gilded Age. Newman and Jacobs present evidence that now widely-hailed parts of the safety net woven during the New Deal (particularly poor relief,  job creation, and old age support) and then during the Great Society (particularly Medicare and poverty programs) at the time faced considerable public ambivalence and even resistance. Roosevelt and Johnson just drove ahead anyway and later Americans were thankful that they did. One implication is that today’s backlash against the Obama health initiative is nothing new.

Another implication is that Americans’ caring for the “least” among them was not much more enthusiastic 50 or 80 years ago than it is now. Had Newman and Jacobs looked back farther back in time, they would have only reinforced their argument. It has always been hard for Americans to meet those religious injunctions.

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Equal Visions

The liberal blogosphere is currently atwitter over a new study produced by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely (pdf) showing how much Americans underestimate economic inequality in America. A 2005 on-line survey asked thousands of respondents to estimate what proportion of all the total wealth in the country was owned by the richest one-fifth of Americans, the next richest one-fifth and so on. On average, the respondents guessed that the richest one-fifth owned about three-fifths of the nation’s wealth; in reality the richest one-fifth own over four-fifths of it. The survey also asked respondents for their ideal distribution; on average, they preferred a society in which the richest one-fifth owned about one-third of the national wealth.

(Although dramatic, these findings are not surprising. Americans have been shown, for example, to underestimate how wide the gaps are in earnings between jobs. And Americans generally cannot provide accurate statistical descriptions of America. For example, they tend to guess that minorities such as blacks and Jews form substantially larger proportions of the population than they really do.)

According to the new study, then, Americans not only think that wealth is much more equally distributed than it really is, they want an America that is much more equal than they imagine it is today. And yet, Americans are notably opposed to the government doing anything to move the distribution of wealth in that direction. Why the contradiction?

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Who Has Your Back

Tornadoes and floods hit Oklahoma . . . . 16 banks in Florida close   . . .  Millions face extended unemployment . . .  Search on for food contamination that felled dozens . . . Workers severely injured when roof collapses . . . Venture capital firm files for bankruptcy . . . .

Q: What do all these headlines have in common, besides being tales of woe? A: That the people injured physically or economically by these woes are helped, often made financially whole. Better yet, many more people who could have been in the same scrapes – killed, injured, broke, homeless, or just recently, endangered by salmonella in eggs – are protected from those threats. By whom? By your insurer of last resort: Uncle Sam.

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Brooks, Policy, and History

In a recent column, David Brooks (who is to applauded for often bringing social science research to his Times readers) argued that social policy has very limited effects on important human outcomes; it is “usually swamped by the influence of culture, ethnicity, psychology and a dozen other factors.”

The historical record, however, suggests that policy decisions often have quite profound consequences.

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Tax Day: The Government-Enterprise System

Facing the prospect of April 15 focuses the mind on what the government that does with those tax dollars.

One common view is that it doesn’t do much, except perhaps get in the way of the “free enterprise system.” Indeed, the Texas Board of Education has gotten  attention recently (for example, here and here) for its revisions of history teaching, including its insistence that textbooks celebrate free enterprise – a term members prefer to “capitalism” – for making America’s economic success.

If the board really wanted to be true to American history, however, it would modify the term to the “government-enterprise system,” because the American people, through their taxes, borrowing, handouts, laws, and regulations – that is, through their government – deserve at least half the credit along with “enterprise.”

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