Bridging the Income Gap

Kristof on the "lefty" US military

A great column by Nick Kristof in The New York Times: Our Lefty Military.Excerpt (but read the whole thing):

As we search for paths out of America’s economic crisis, many suggest business as a paradigm for cutting costs. According to my back-of-the-envelope math, top C.E.O.’s earn as much as $1 a second around the clock, partly by cutting medical benefits for employees. So they must be paragons of efficiency, right? 

Actually, I’m not so sure. The business sector is dazzlingly productive, but it also periodically blows up our financial system. Yet if we seek another model, one that emphasizes universal health care and educational opportunity, one that seeks to curb income inequality, we don’t have to turn to Sweden. Rather, look to the United States military. 

You see, when our armed forces are not firing missiles, they live by an astonishingly liberal ethos — and it works. The military helped lead the way in racial desegregation, and even today it does more to provide equal opportunity to working-class families — especially to blacks — than just about any social program.

It has been an escalator of social mobility in American society because it invests in soldiers and gives them skills and opportunities. The United States armed forces knit together whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics from diverse backgrounds, invests in their education and training, provides them with excellent health care and child care. 

And it does all this with minimal income gaps: A senior general earns about 10 times what a private makes, while, by my calculation, C.E.O.’s at major companies earn about 300 times as much as those cleaning their offices. That’s right: the military ethos can sound pretty lefty. 

“It’s the purest application of socialism there is,” Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general and former supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe, told me. And he was only partly joking. 

“It’s a really fair system, and a lot of thought has been put into it, and people respond to it really well,” he added. The country can learn from that sense of mission, he said, from that emphasis on long-term strategic thinking.

That sounds like the US Army I served in during the mid-60s: blacks and Hispanics building real careers, good medical and dental care, the finest education system on the planet, and a poster in every sick bay: "The Army Takes Care of Its Own."

McQuaig: Inequality bad for health and economy

From an interview published today in The Tyee: McQuaig: Inequality Bad for Health and Economy.

"First, we've seen a dramatic increase in inequality. Over the past 30 years, all income growth has gone to the top. Middle-class family income has been stuck, while the income growth has been explosive the higher up you go. 

"Second, people have been aware of this general trend, but they assume it's the result of technological change, or globalism, or meritocracy -- that unlike the days of inherited wealth, the people at the top have now earned their wealth. In our book, we show that the rich have gained control of the political agenda and rigged the rules. 

"Third, we have to understand how damaging this is to society. Even a lot of progressives say we should focus on poverty, because it looks like envy if we criticize the rich. But the evidence of damage is overwhelming: Bad health, bad social outcomes like drugs and teen pregnancy, and a negative impact on the economy. Inequality is a recipe for stagnation and speculation."

Stark gaps in UK life expectancy between north, south, rich and poor

Via The Guardian: Stark gaps in UK life expectancy between north, south, rich and poor. Excerpt:

A four-year north-south divide in life expectancy at birth for men is revealed in official figures for the UK published on Wednesday. 

For men in the south-east of England it is 79.4 years, while in Scotland the figure is 75.4, according to the Office for National Statistics. For women the gap is slightly less: 83.3 in south-east and south-west England against 80.1 in Scotland. 

But the differences are even more stark at a local level. In the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, men stand to live 84.4 years and women 89 years. That is more than a decade longer than the Glasgow figure of 71.1 years for men and 77.5 for women. 

Health areas with lowest life expectancy are Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Hartlepool, Western Isles, Liverpool and Blackburn with Darwen. 

The pattern in the geographic age gaps remains similar to those of previous years, showing just how stubborn social and economic inequalities remain.