JAMES SRODES:Terms of Enrichment
Reynolds, Alan
face is the only one we see. B O O K S I N R E V I E W The slugging Dempsey, who was champion throughout the 1920s and had a stature on par with Babe Ruth, had lost his title to Tunney the...
...And what about the terrible drinking problem that Tunney developed after he left the ring...
...He also shows us how the “two Americas” crowd is messing with our minds with their statistical fabrications...
...tly and ” biography, an arrangement the author rejected...
...What does it tell us that in two full-length autobiographies Tunney can barely bring himself to mention his father, a longshoreman on the Hudson River docks who bought him his first pair of boxing gloves...
...Yet while Cavanaugh was denied access to what must be a treasure trove of information, he could have done more with what is available to explore Tunney’s character...
...But Dempsey forgot the rule, agreed on beforehand, that a fighter scoring a knockdown had to retreat to a “neutral” corner before the count could be started...
...B O O K S I N R E V I E W The slugging Dempsey, who was champion throughout the 1920s and had a stature on par with Babe Ruth, had lost his title to Tunney the previous year in a huge upset...
...She also points to the more recent conundrum of the lowest-income earners (the tenth decile) who have tended to out-earn middle-class management types whose jobs have been outsourced...
...The crowd cheered him after he lost both Tunney fights, and they gravitated to his popular Broadway restaurant for 40 years...
...According to the scraps of information out there, Tunney’s drinking went back at least as far as his stint in the U.S...
...The mobility of these younger and upwardly mobile people also usually means they move into the upper quintiles rather quickly so from one election cycle to the next we are not always talking about exactly the same people...
...Other changes caused share owners in Subchapter-S corporations, partnerships, or limited liability companies to shift income that had been reported on corporate returns to their individual tax liabilities—thereby significantly inflating the individual reports without significantly changing the actual amount of income being taken in...
...to seriously consider taking the risk of making our economy more rewarding for more of the people...
...In 1986, a massive overhaul of the federal tax laws altered the way many highincome earners estimated and reported on their returns...
...For just $24.95 (includes S&H) take a trip down memory lane, or begin the journey anew with these delightful selections of Miss King’s voluminous collection of essays from 1991-2002...
...The median income of a household headed by someone with a doctorate degree was more than $96,000 while that of a high school graduate was $36,000...
...Whereas the income of the top fifth of U.S...
...Please call 800.524.3469, visit www.spectator.org/DejaReviews, or mail a check to: The American Spectator, 1611 N. Kent Street, Ste...
...7 2 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 7...
...Tax-exempt municipal bond income had to be disclosed for the first time in 1987...
...Now their second fight was unfolding in much the same way, until the seventh round, when Dempsey suddenly found the mark and put Tunney down with a barrage of punches, the only knockdown Tunney suffered in his career...
...Then there are the ones called the wealthy...
...The rule was created with Dempsey in mind...
...Then there is the nature of the people themselves, for the lower fifth is heavily weighted to single young people just starting out, older seniors easing into retirement, newly arrived immigrants, in addition to the disabled, the addicted, the unemployed, and those who choose to live on the fringes of our society in one fashion or another...
...he had become notorious for standing over fallen opponents and blasting them back to the canvas...
...Paul Krugman and other economists on the left have now absolutely fixed in the popular mind that Americans in the lowest income cohort of our population are not only desperately poor but also are rapidly losing ground while a tiny fraction (often described as 1 percent or a fraction thereof ) are getting grotesquely richer, unfairly wealthier, and dangerousDeja Reviews: Florence King All Over Again – Selections from National Review and The American Spectator “The lady knows nothing of mediocrity...
...Dempsey had an impromptu way of saying memorable things, the best example of which was, “Honey, I forgot to duck” (employed half a century later by another natural genius, Ronald Reagan...
...To the old saw that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics—one must add political statistics, which are even more damnable...
...At the referee’s “nine,” Tunney rose, evaded Dempsey’s rushes, and went on to win the fight by decision...
...quintile) or 10 percent (decile...
...This artificially deflates the income levels they cite for the poor since the omission leaves average money income for work and savings for these people at an astonishing and seemingly unsupportable level...
...Sooner or later, a biographer needs to quit playing defense himself and venture a point of view...
...She even pooh-poohs the European social safety nets that have sacrificed general prosperity and economic growth for rigid employment and welfare systems...
...Pitiless inside the ring but generous and good-humored outside of it, Dempsey was loved for good reasons...
...Without an interrogation of its subject, Cavanaugh’s biography is too much like Tunney himself: impressive on every surface, but silent at its center...
...Paul Greenberg, Introduction to Deja Reviews Get the very best of Miss Florence King from both National Review and The American Spectator in our new book, Deja Reviews...
...Some sort of income intervention to help the poor deserves “high policy priority...
...Reynolds demonstrates the important distinctions among households played by job experience, educational attainment, marital status, race, and gender and how many of those ratios have changed...
...Spages...
...Reynolds notes, “If salaries and employee benefits generally rise faster than inflation, while government transfer payments do not, then the gap between two-earner families at the top and no-earner households at the bottom must necessarily widen over time...
...Witness Janet L. Yellen, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco...
...Who was Tunney, really, and what was the source of his amazing willfulness...
...Well, actually , that public face were compounded by the And when the rant s AVANAUGH’S DIFFICULTIES in getting beyond well armed for the two years of s rich, the poor too poor tarts ” you can cough quie , “The rich have become too , that’s no truggle that lie ahead...
...Navy in World War II, and his problem seems to have been more severe than garden variety alcoholism...
...But the big change in the status of the wealthy 1 percent (1.3 million people, by the way) turns out to have more to do with changes in the tax laws and securities regulations than in any suddenly unfair advantage in grinding the poor...
...Debates raged about how long Tunney was on the canvas, whether he could have gotten up if not given extra time, and whether the referee’s action was fair...
...No Krugmanite, Yellen earned her spurs at the Fed in Washington and on President Clinton’s oft-ignored Council of Economic Advisers...
...But Reynolds also points out that most economists do not count such transfer payments as income because, presumably, they are not earned...
...Only after Dempsey retreated did the referee begin his count...
...THE APPEARANCE of the poor getting poorer while the rich leaped ahead turns out to be something of a canard, but it is a duck that will not be easily killed...
...After all these years, their protectiveness is remarkable, even inspiring, for those who still admire such things...
...Any attempt at transition between the blasts would be ludicrous, like playing a waltz between artillery barrages...
...By contrast, Tunney was like the William Howard Taft to Dempsey’s Theodore Roosevelt, the gifted but bloodless successor to a man shrouded in myth...
...To say that Florence King doesn’t suffer fools gladly is an understatement akin to suggesting that Fred Astaire could maneuver quite nicely on the dance floor...
...Unlike Dempsey, whose vivid character emerges from even the dustiest boxing histories, Tunney is a name attached to a series of deeds...
...What Reynolds has done in Income and Wealth is take a calming breath and walk us through the reality of what is truly going on, and how truly interesting it is...
...Recently in her bank’s economic newsletter she tackled the question of economic inequality, making the correct connection between the broad gains in productivity in the U.S...
...The image is hard to reconcile with the youthful paragon of discipline, yet Cavanaugh never raises the issue, even in passing...
...America is transforming itself in ways that can be fabulously beneficial, but the people to whom we hand our political mandate must have an extraordinarily clear vision lest we drive ourselves right into a ditch...
...His inscrutable public CTunney family’s interest in an authorized commence...
...So there is change and much of it is for the better...
...The danger is that the myth will lead us into tinkering with wrongs that don’t exist and thereby causing enormous damage while not solving very real problems of those among us who are disadvantaged and in need of help...
...Still, at the end, she can’t help it...
...The fate of our democratic society is in peril...
...Clouding that vision is the lie of “two Americas” as it is called...
...Now, with so much at stake, he reverted to his old ways and stood over Tunney...
...Like Reynolds, she distinguishes between citizens who have advanced educational attainment and higher incomes and those who do not...
...That this is a dangerous time should be selfevident even without the turmoil of the Middle ly powerful in the process...
...People magazine This is a limited time offer...
...Women had median earnings of only 56.6 percent of men in 1973 but that gap closed to 76.5 percent by 2004...
...One of those sporting controversies that takes on a life of its own—like Ruth’s called shot or Bobby Thomson’s home run off Ralph Branca—the Long Count defined the two men in the public imagination forever...
...And Tunney slips away from us again, maybe for good...
...901, Arlington, VA 22209 F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 7 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 7 1 B O O K S I N R E V I E W time, Reynolds shows that most of the income (77 percent) of the lower 20 percent comes from government transfer payments including supplemental Social Security Income, the Earned Income Tax Credit, disability, unemployment, Medicaid, food stamps, and the like...
...The mystery of Gene Tunney—what drove him, and what eventually broke him—remains...
...With one important note: it was always Dempsey’s name that came first...
...The first important point Reynolds makes is that one should always look at what makes up a statistic and nowhere is that more important than when considering what kind of Americans live in the lowest income levels of our society—usually called the lower 20 percent (a.k.a...
...Then go o tle colored P O GO OUT AND BUY out among your friends who s st-its in among the important THIS BOOK...
...households is mostly from two or more people working full Reviewed by James Srodes East...
...Like its late patriarch, the family seems determined to James Srodes, an author and broadcaster, is a former control the terms on which they engage the Am- Washington bureau chief for Forbes and Financial erican public...
...She explains, “Inequality has risen to the point that it seems to me worthwhile for the U.S...
...EYNOLDS IS AN ACCESSIBLE WRITER so that a reader who patronizes H&R Block for his own fiscal obligations can easily comprehend what is going on in our society...
...Which may be why any collection of her writings goes off like a fireworks display...
...Were Tunney and Dempsey really “close friends” in later life, as commonly described, or did Tunney resent Dempsey’s popularity...
...70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 7 Terms of Enrichment Income and Wealth by Alan Reynolds (GREENWOOD PRESS, 231 PAGES, $55) B O O K S I N R E V I E W Alan Reynolds has produced an important resource for the political melee that will engulf us between now and November 2008 as the Republican Party scrambles around trying to find its moral compass and the Democrats prescribe solutions for an America that may have existed in 1970 but certainly does not exist today...
...economy and the current run of prosperity we have enjoyed over the last 25 years...
...Here was the most resolute champion of self-control that ever graced American sports, given to writing articles on the dangers of smoking and asserting that a man’s goal at 40 should be to attain greater fitness than he enjoyed at 20...
...Here is where the fantasies begin...
...The obvious is still true: the more education one has, the more one earns...
...Read it and stick littill have “Kerry for President” stickers on their Volvos World magazines...
...t true at all...
...You see what Reynolds is up against...
Vol. 40 • February 2007 • No. 1
