The Public Policy / Mainstream Marxism Rebutted

...Examples abound of the logical and statistical machinations mobilized in support of these theses, but so thoroughly have they penetrated our daily literature that for casual readers distinguishing fact from planted myth is often impossible, even assuming the will to try...

...The result over time has been an unnatural political homogeneity in some university departments as well as in a few pockets of the federal government...

...It is of course not possible to measure the ultimate impact on public opinion with anything resembling precision...

...But most important of all is the fact that the Census tabulation is a mindless exercise in bureaucratic routine, utterly meaningless for the purpose used...

...Abetted by radicals, the myth has grown that self-indulgent Americans have cut their savings to the bone, thussqueezing the nation's investment...

...Reference is to food stamps, Medicaid, housing subsidies, and the like...

...The tabulation in question, concocted by the Census Bureau, shows what it advertises as "Money Income of Families: Percent Distribution...

...EI our central themes govern the respectable radicals' efforts: (1) The Reagan Administration has undermined America's industrial might, beating it down to second-class status...

...4) It takes no account of the population's age distribution, specifically, an increase in the proportion of young workers relative to the middle-aged (when lifetime incomes are at a peak), contributing a false bias toward inequality...

...3) In a living caricature of capitalist avarice, the by Melville J. Ulmer distribution of income has grown retrogressively more unequal...

...Radicals indicted Reagan's 1981 tax cuts for favoring the rich...

...In the nation's drift to the political right during the past decade, they have served as a stubbornly dragging anchor, diluting confidence in prevailing institutions and buttressing opposition and dissent...

...They are also deft practitioners of affirmative action—that is, affirmatively in support of fellow radicals...

...Facts: real household assets rose by 53 percent since 1980 compared to a 3 percent rise in all of the 1970s...

...Their identification with left-ofcenter liberals is supported by the immediate reforms they advocate—public employment, guaranteed jobs in industry, higher taxes on upper incomes, cuts in defense, stiffened business regulations, up with minimum wages, down with Reagan, and so on...

...Add to that almost countless articles by the prolific Gordon, Harrison, and Gar Alperovits, plus "studies" supported by the Urban Institute, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, and sundry other organizations...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 27...

...Their impress on public opinion stems from a phenomenal ability to penetrate not only the universities but also powerful congressional staffs, strategic government bureaus, reputable research institutes, and political organizations deemed to be conventionally liberal...

...The title alone, as we'll see, is ingenuously deceptive, but we'll let that go for the moment...

...The deceptions have won the widest possible popular circulation...

...With the help of a microscope one may detect in these figures a slight decline over the last ten or twenty years in the proportion of the nation's money income going to the poorest fifth of the population and a tiny increase in that going to the richest fifth...

...In fact, according to the latest (1987) reports of all authoritative sources (including the World Bank, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations, and the U.S...

...small number of home-grown radical economists allied, in disguise or not, with liberals...

...That strongly suggests that the poor as well as the rich have gained...

...Consider the alleged battering of the American economy, now crushed despairingly below that of our trading partners—uncompetitive and "deindustrialized," as a study by Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone maintained...

...Fact: the proportion of total taxes paid by the richest one percent rose from 18 percent in 1981 to more than 23 percent in 1985 (the latest year for which IRS data are available...

...For it thoroughly excludes every one of the measures adopted by society to increase equality since the 1930s, to wit: (1) It measured incomes before payment of income taxes, which obviously hit upper incomes most and much of the poor not at all...

...A full account of other disinformation would occupy a heavyweight treatise...

...Nevertheless they are large enough to support sloganeering on the left, all solemnly published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other respected founts of public information...

...They have also been summarized and extended, in effect, by left-liberals like Lester Thurow in his highly regarded The Zero-Sum Solution: Building A World-Class American Economy (1985...

...They are mostly the precocious spawn of the tumultuous 1960s now grown up to brew their tartuferies as professors, in major universities and some schools of lesser rank...

...Fact: between 1982 and 1987 the total number of minimum-wage employees actually declined by 25 percent compared with a 50-percent increase in those holding jobs paying $10 or more per hour...

...The ruse in this instance is to publish an apparently innocent but clearly dumb official government tabulation and then blatantly misinterpret it...

...What is wanting mainly is vigorous leadership to guide it through the present confusions...

...The changes are small enough to be easily accounted for by sampling and other measurement errors...

...Though rarely recognized as a cohesive group—and still less as revolutionaries incognito—they are today a source of growing political influence...

...Of the thirty-one states they cited, fourteen enjoyed even stronger advances than the nation as a whole, in employment as well as production...

...But since they do not expect an American revolution very Melville J. Ulmer is emeritus professor of economics at the University of Maryland...

...Facts: manufacturing output rose in every year from 1982 through 1987, by 35 percent in all...

...URPE now has a membership of about 2,000, about one-tenth that of the all-inclusive American Economic Association...

...It seems that only a socialist revolution can lay the foundations for a society where there is equal opportunity for all people, continuing economic prosperity, freedom of expression in culture, politics and science, and peace...

...Here is the sparest partial summary I can devise: •In the past five years a record-breaking business expansion created 13 million new jobs...

...2) Opportunities to rise in the nation's economy, except for the already rich, have disappeared...

...Even the gruff and normally astute conservative John McLaughlin succumbed to the mesmerism of constant repetition, lamenting (in National Review, July 31, 1987) that America's real per capita GNP had dropped "for the first time below Japan's and West Germany's...

...A carefully overlooked but relevant datum is that the median family income, after correction for inflation, advanced by more than one-third in the past twenty-five years and by 10 per-cent just since 1982...

...For that task the radical economists are especially well equipped...

...The line of radicals is that the new jobs were of the meanest possible dead-end luncheon-counter variety...

...For predictably, the radical response to such refutations is to ignore them...

...As extreme examples, the economics departments of the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) and the New School for Social Research in New York are populated almost entirely by URPE members...

...Nor do documented facts and logic deter some of the radicals' liberal sympathizers, like Lester Thurow and Lawrence Klein, from reproducing again and again the misleading Census tabulation just described, without appropriate corrections...

...That "the poor get poorer and the rich richer" is a refrain that embellishes virtually all radical literature and rings tinkling bells among liberals too...

...Bureau of Labor Statistics), the 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 U.S.'s real GNP per capita exceeded Japan's by 41 percent, West Germany's by 33 percent, and Great Britain's by fully 51 percent...

...Such "findings" have been gratefully circulated through virtually all channels of publication, in rapid succession as though one confirmed the other...

...It is reinforced by another 8,000 in sister organizations drawn from political science, history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, English literature, law, even the sciences, and such new "disciplines" as women's studies, African studies, peace studies, and criminal justice...

...They publish widely, not only in professional journals including their own (the quarterly Review of Radical Political Economics), but also in popular magazines (like the New Yorker and Harper's), prestigious newspapers (like the New York Times and the Washington Post), and even in the official literature of the federal government (such as reports of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress...

...Not only that but our commanding lead over the rest of the world grew in recent years with higher productivity and employment rates...

...The most enduring organization of radicals in academe has been the Union of Radical Political Economists (URPE), founded jointly at Harvard and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in 1968...

...I mean to ring no alarm bells here, since the basic undertow of public sentiment seems still to be dominantly centrist or conservative...

...He could not have been further from the truth...

...Their results showed a pronounced trend toward equality during the past twenty to thirty years, a finding that would clearly cheer the egalitarians among us if they took time out from denying it...

...Most are professional economists, often of some note, adding thoroughly unwarranted weight to their policy advices...

...As Marxists, however, respectable radicals are strictly collectivist in their long-term goals...

...From 1980 to 1987 the nation's gross investment advanced by 60 percent...

...As the University of California's Howard Sherman declaimed in his introductory textbook Radical Political Economy (1972): "I am a Marxist...

...Accordingly, for public consumption respectable radicals appear as simply indignant, often hot-headed liberals...

...erhaps the radical deceptions that 1- cut most deeply into people's faith in public policies are those related to such tender topics as compassion and fairness...

...collapsed in 1986 with at least thirty-one states thrown into depression...

...The founding fathers were advanced graduate students already on university payrolls as instructors, most often in social science survey courses...

...But despite this variegated font for collegiate brainwashing, it is URPE and its economists who rise above all others of this company in engineering public assaults on America's political and economic system...

...Some enterprising private economists estimated the net effect of these omissions...

...3) It also misses much of the welfare payments in cash, which in undetermined amounts go unreported...

...Except in rare cases such as McLaughlin's, the failure to acknowledge them—indeed the willful fabrication of falsehoods to replace them—is consistent only with a concerted determination to deceive the general public and manipulate its political decisions...

...2) It excludes non-money income which happens to be the largest and fastest growing segment of assistance for the poor, now costing taxpayers about $70 billion annually...

...As for the specific libel of "deindustrialization" circulated even by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, our total real GNP rose by 18 percent since 1981 while investment scooted up by 26 percent, showing vigorous further industrialization...

...Nevertheless there is considerable evidence that the radical-liberal efforts have at least not been entirely ineffectual...

...That proposition has been repetitively entertained in impressive books by radicals Robert Heilbroner, Robert Lekachman (the reputed "dean" of socialist economists), Samuel Bowles, David Gordon, Thomas Weisskopf, and Jack Gurley...

...But that is the least of the story...

...Typically, they wield quick pens and a persuasive patter capable of swaying the mass of liberal sentiment...

...The most authoritative analysis available of some thirty national opinion polls discloses a distinct "decline in public confidence in American economic and political institutions" from the 1960s to date...

...The techniques used for obscuring realities in this area are more subtle than those described above, which simply required brazen prevarication...

...All the numbers just cited may be easily found in any public library...

...Because of foreign inroads, radicals had claimed, manufacturing in the U.S...

...soon, their short-term goal is less overweening: i.e., to displace conservative federal administrations, if and when they arise, with ones tilted as far as possible to the left...

...The trend was indeed broken by temporary recoveries but was definitely downward in the long-term and downward most recently...

...4) Redressing these evils requires intervention by government on a scale hitherto unapproached...

...One result has been a spectacular world-leading increase in output per man-hour, a statistic that hits the eyes of doomsayers like denatured alcohol...

...In sum, a massive flow of misinformation has been generated about American society, much of it—probably most—originated by a relatively 'The last two items were inspired by that Sherlock Holmes of statistical skullduggery, Warren T. Brookes of the Washington Times...