What Will It Take for Us to Get Back to Being a Decent Society?
POSTED BY: Niki2
UPDATED: Saturday, April 25, 2026 00:05
VIEWED: 18057
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It’s the season to show concern for the less fortunate among us. We should also be concerned about the widening gap between the most fortunate and everyone else.
Although it’s still possible to win the lottery (your chance of winning $636 million in the recent Mega Millions sweepstakes was one in 259 million), the biggest lottery of all is what family we’re born into. Our life chances are now determined to an unprecedented degree by the wealth of our parents.
That’s not always been the case. The faith that anyone could move from rags to riches – with enough guts and gumption, hard work and nose to the grindstone – was once at the core of the American Dream.
And equal opportunity was the heart of the American creed. Although imperfectly achieved, that ideal eventually propelled us to overcome legalized segregation by race, and to guarantee civil rights. It fueled efforts to improve all our schools and widen access to higher education. It pushed the nation to help the unemployed, raise the minimum wage, and provide pathways to good jobs. Much of this was financed by taxes on the most fortunate.
But for more than three decades we’ve been going backwards. It’s far more difficult today for a child from a poor family to become a middle-class or wealthy adult. Or even for a middle-class child to become wealthy.
The major reason is widening inequality. The longer the ladder, the harder the climb. America is now more unequal that it’s been for eighty or more years, with the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of all developed nations. Equal opportunity has become a pipe dream.
Rather than respond with policies to reverse the trend and get us back on the road to equal opportunity and widely-shared prosperity, we’ve spent much of the last three decades doing the opposite.
Taxes have been cut on the rich, public schools have deteriorated, higher education has become unaffordable for many, safety nets have been shredded, and the minimum wage has been allowed to drop 30 percent below where it was in 1968, adjusted for inflation.
Congress has just passed a tiny bipartisan budget agreement, and the Federal Reserve has decided to wean the economy off artificially low interest rates. Both decisions reflect Washington’s (and Wall Street’s) assumption that the economy is almost back on track.
But it’s not at all back on the track it was on more than three decades ago.
It’s certainly not on track for the record 4 million Americans now unemployed for more than six months, or for the unprecedented 20 million American children in poverty (we now have the highest rate of child poverty of all developed nations other than Romania), or for the third of all working Americans whose jobs are now part-time or temporary, or for the majority of Americans whose real wages continue to drop.
How can the economy be back on track when 95 percent of the economic gains since the recovery began in 2009 have gone to the richest 1 percent?
The underlying issue is a moral one: What do we owe one another as members of the same society?
Conservatives answer that question by saying it’s a matter of personal choice – of charitable works, philanthropy, and individual acts of kindness joined in “a thousand points of light.”
But that leaves out what we could and should seek to accomplish together as a society. It neglects the organization of our economy, and its social consequences. It minimizes the potential role of democracy in determining the rules of the game, as well as the corruption of democracy by big money. It overlooks our strivings for social justice.
In short, it ducks the meaning of a decent society.
Last month Pope Francis wondered aloud whether “trickle-down theories, which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness…”. Rush Limbaugh accused the Pope of being a Marxist for merely raising the issue.
But the question of how to bring about greater justice and inclusiveness is as ANOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
When I was growing up, bank managers and ceo's probably earned about 3 or 4 times that their basic employee did. Houses were smaller, but almost everyone could afford to buy one. Electricity and gas, publically owned in those days, were dirt cheap. Cars were expensive. Most households only had one. Medicare had just been expanded and all education, including tertiary was free. Welfare was very generous and not many checks and balances about how it was accessed.
There are lots of things about those days I do not long for.... the position of women in society, the open sexism, racism and homophobia - but I do miss that it was a much more stable place and less dog eat dog. I'm kind of horrified at what ambition has done to some of my closest friends who are really chasing big big salaries and what it has meant for their lives.
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MAGONS, have you heard this before?
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Of course!
Not that version, which sound beautiful but the original.
Eric Bogle
The Pogues had a hit with it as well.
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Liam Clancy (of the Clancy Brothers) does a version of it that will make you cry.
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I was talking with a temp who works in the lab. He was telling me about the jobs that have been offered him, the payscales, and the conditions attached. He has advanced degrees in both physics and chemistry and years of work experience. He was offered a job that paid $17/ hr. Another place offered to pay him by the month - no matter how many days or hours he worked. Another potential employer said he would get $25/hr but have to work Saturdays for free. He said the people who he knows - with his level of education and experience - are in the same boat.
So, I asked him if this was due to businesses being extremely wary about spending money, or if it was an attitude. And he told me it was an attitude, because those same people thought nothing about paying themselves hefty salaries and bonuses. They didn't mind spending business money on themselves - not for work but just b/c they were owners, they just couldn't see their way to paying other people a reasonable wage, for a 40 hour week.
His story corresponds with the stories of the other temps who come through. And it corresponds with what the security guard tells me, about how the owner of the company thinks nothing about having everyone's (minimum wage) paychecks 'accidentally' be a week late - every pay cycle. It corresponds with what the waitresses at the restaurant tell me - that they are expected to show up early and set up for free, and stay late and close up for free.
When the economy crashed and people lost jobs and got desperate, business people became what they always wanted to be - greedy without restraint. People got desperate for jobs, and business owners took advantage without any consideration.
So no, I don't expect this society to go 'back' to being decent. For one thing, it never was. In the US we floated on the post WWII destruction other countries were struggling with to give us our first-place economy. And besides, this is a capitalist economy. Profit is the only goal. That won't change.
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Originally posted by NewOldBrownCoat:
Liam Clancy (of the Clancy Brothers) does a version of it that will make you cry.
Aye, that he does.
A story about this song. Many years ago when i was a wee slip of a lass, I travelled through Ireland and ended up on Cape Clear Island off the west coast. Gaeltact area. In fact it had an Irish Language Summer school. Beautiful and bleak place. In the pub, it was tradition, as in many parts of Ireland, to sing. People were trying to get me to sing a traditional Australian song, but I just dont sing like that ie on my own in front of a whole bunch of strangers all be they friendly enough. Even a few draughts of Irish brew didn't give me courage. One Irish lad started with the Band Played Waltzing Mathilda and the whole pub joined in. I was stunned, I wasn't aware that the song was known outside of home, but the Pogues had recently done a version which was well known.
Anyway, speaking of the Pogues, Shane McGowan sings a duet that always makes me feel Christmassy (in a boozy, down and out, aint life a bucket of shit way)
still sad that the wonderful Kirsty MacColl was tragically killed.
Anyway, back to the thread.
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The supply-side, trickle-down, market-fundamentalist views that took root in America in the early 1980s got us fundamentally off track.
Complete rubbish. The slide started in the 60's. The 'decent society' you're looking for existed in the 50's. Or maybe the 30's. Or maybe... never ?
Fathom the hypocrisy of a government that requires every citizen to prove they are insured... but not everyone must prove they are a citizen
I'm just a red pill guy in a room full of blue pill addicts.
" AU, that was great, LOL!! " - Chrisisall
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Quote:"Wealth Gives Rise to a Sense of Entitlement and Narcissistic Behaviors"
Originally posted by AURaptor:
Complete rubbish. The slide started in the 60's. The 'decent society' you're looking for existed in the 50's. Or maybe the 30's. Or maybe... never ?
www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/25/study-finds-wealth-gives-rise-to-a-sens
e-of-entitlement-and-narcissistic-behaviors/
Here are two fun videos on the subject:
"Does money make you mean?"
"The Science of Greed : Why the Ideology of self interest could be the downfall of the American Dream."
"Upper class more likely to be scofflaws due to greed"
www.psypost.org/2012/02/upper-class-more-likely-to-be-scofflaws-due-to
-greed-10230
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How about this for a theory of what went wrong recently? “Wealth is deranging the minds of America's most influential people, which steadily lowers, year after year, the quality of their major decisions affecting the rest of America.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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