Using The Bully Pulpit To Highlight Inequality
Eduardo Porter criticizes President Obama’s economic plan today. He actually thinks the big parts (infrastructure investment, pre-K education for all) are good, but given the Republican opposition, they aren’t going to happen. So he (quite reasonably in my view) thinks the President should point out to the American public how badly big policy changes are needed.
A better strategy might be to articulate — forcefully — the nature of the problem and build a political consensus that would ultimately lead to long-delayed changes to American society.
It could go something like this:
The United States remains among the richest countries in the world. National income per person trails only that of Norway, Luxembourg, Singapore, Switzerland and Hong Kong. Yet despite its riches, in many areas the United States looks surprisingly, depressingly backward.
Infant and maternal mortality are the highest among advanced nations. So is the mortality rate of children under the age of 20. Life expectancy — at birth and at age 60 — is among the lowest.
Teenage pregnancy rates are not only higher than in other rich nations, they are higher than in Kazakhstan and Burundi. The United States has the highest rate of children living with a single parent among the industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
I’m not sure the President can accomplish anything by highlighting all this but it would be worth seeing him try to explain that the gaping and growing inequality in this country is a slow moving disaster.
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By: Stuart Shapiro
Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.